Directed by Fronza Woods • Documentary • 1981 • 15 minutes
In FANNIE'S FILM, a 65-year-old cleaning woman for a professional dancers' exercise studio performs her job while telling us in voiceover about her life, hopes, goals, and feelings. A challenge to mainstream media's ongoing stereotypes of women of color who earn their living as domestic workers, this seemingly simple documentary achieves a quiet revolution: the expressive portrait of a fully realized individual. Part of the mediamaking movement that first gave centrality to the voices and experiences of African American women during the late seventies and early eighties.
"Very simply, one of the best short films that I’ve ever seen.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Up Next in African-American Docs
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Third Ward TX
Directed by Andrew Garrison, Nancy Bless and Noland Walker • Documentary • 2007 • 55 minutes
THIRD WARD TX is the story of how Project Row Houses uses the tools of design, art and architecture to transform two blocks of “shotgun” houses familiar across the South into exhibition space, classrooms...
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Black is... Black Ain't (Marlon Riggs)
Directed by Marlon Riggs • Documentary • 1995 • 87 minutes
Having grappled with the stereotypes imposed upon black people by white America, Riggs turned his attention to another fraught issue: the definitions of “blackness” that African-Americans impose on each other. Weaving together poetry, co...
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The Caretaker
Directed by Theo Rigby • Documentary • 2014 • 7 minutes
The Caretaker is a short film about the relationship between an immigrant caretaker and an elderly woman in the last months of her life. Joesy, a Fijian immigrant, works long hours providing live-in care for 95-year-old Haru Tsurumoto. Thro...
