Women Make Movies
From cutting-edge documentaries that give depth to today’s headlines to smart, stunning films that push artistic and intellectual boundaries in all genres, Women Make Movies (WMM), a non-profit feminist social enterprise based in New York, is the world’s leading distributor of independent films by and about women.
As the leading distributor of women's films in North America, Women Make Movies works with organizations and institutions that utilize non-commercial, educational media in their programs. This includes media arts centers, museums, galleries, colleges and universities, as well as other non-profit organizations and agencies, ranging from hospitals to prisons to labor unions to the U.S. Army. Our collection of more than 500 titles includes documentary, experimental, animation, dramatic and mixed-genre work. The films and videotapes represent a diversity of styles, subjects and perspectives in women's lives. More than half of the works in the collection were produced by women of diverse cultures, and the collection includes a variety of works by and about lesbians, older women and women with disabilities.
Women Make Movies is proud to have films in their collection by renowned filmmakers such as Jane Campion, Julie Dash, Sally Potter, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Lourdes Portillo, Tracey Moffatt, Valie Export, Kim Longinotto, Pratibha Parmar, Ngozi Onwurah and Ulrike Ottinger, among others, as well as films that have garnered top prizes at prestigious film festivals such as Cannes and Sundance. The Production Assistance program continues to support the production and development of film and video projects. In the past four years over 200 projects were completed with the assistance of the Fiscal Sponsorship Program. Projects that WMM has supported and distributed have won all of the most prestigious media awards including the Academy Award, Emmy Award and the Peabody Award, among others.
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Jane Campion: Peel
Directed by Jane Campion • Drama • 1982 • 9 minutes
On a hot Australian summer's day, a recalcitrant, freckled, red-headed family of three go on a Sunday drive in the country. Their outing results in an intrigue of awesome belligerence.
Cannes, Golden Palm for Best Short Film
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Jane Campion: A Girl's Own Story
Directed by Jane Campion • Drama • 1984 • 27 minutes
Beatlemania, the sixties and growing up. Some stories about girlhood: where family is strange, adulthood lonely, and innocence perverse.
"A beautifully photographed, sharply drawn drama...A lovely debut which will be compared to Jane Campion'...
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Jane Campion: Passionless Moments
Directed by Jane Campion • Drama • 1983 • 13 minutes
Winner of the Best Experimental Film at the Australian Film Awards, PASSIONLESS MOMENTS follows an omniscient narrator retelling of a series of brief, impressionistic vignettes around a neighborhood in Sydney.
“A structurally playful and surr...
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Choice Thoughts: Reflections on the Birth Control War
Directed by Jacqueline Frank • Documentary • 1996 • 10 minutes
In a witty mix of rare archival footage and sound bites from religious and political leaders, filmmaker Jacqueline Frank takes a fast-paced look at 100 years of the fight for birth control and legalized abortion. Featuring a concise ...
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Margaret Sanger: A Public Nuisance
Directed by Terese Svoboda and Steve Bull • Documentary • 1992 • 28 minutes
MARGARET SANGER: A PUBLIC NUISANCE highlights Sanger's pioneering strategies of using media and popular culture to advance the cause of birth control. It tells the story of her arrest and trial, using actuality films, va...
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I Had An Abortion
Directed by Gillian Aldrich and Jennifer Baumgardner • Documentary • With Gloria Steinem • 2005 • 55 minutes
Underneath the din of politicians posturing about "life" and "choice" and beyond the shouted slogans about murder and rights, there are real stories of real women who have had abortions. ...
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It Was Rape
Directed by Jennifer Baumgardner • Documentary • 2013 • 60 minutes
U.S. sexual assault statistics are startling—and have remained unchanged for decades. The latest White House Council on Women and Girls report reveals that nearly one in five women experiences rape or attempted rape in her lifeti...
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Middle of Everywhere: The Abortion Debate from America's Heartland
Directed by Rebecca Lee & Jesper Malmberg • Documentary • 2008 • 52 minutes
South Dakota is America’s heartland—waving cornfields, hard-working farmers, family values and a population of 750,000, the majority of whom identify as conservative and anti-abortion. Native daughter Rebecca Lee returns...
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The Yellow Wallpaper
Directed by Marie Ashton • Drama • With Sigrid Wurschmidt, Tom Dahlgren, Susan Lynch • 1989 • 14 minutes
This short dramatic film brings to life the classic Charlotte Perkins Gilman story of the same name, which has become an important addition to American literature course curricula. Set in the...
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Riddles of the Sphinx
Directed by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen • Drama • With Dinah Stabb, Merdelle Jordine, Rhiannon Tise • 1977 • 92 minutes
Laura Mulvey, author of the seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, helped to establish feminist film theory as a legitimate field of study. With Peter Wollen, sh...
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The Heretics
Directed by Joan Braderman • Documentary • 2009 • 95 minutes
Tracing the influence of the Women’s Movement’s Second Wave on art and life, THE HERETICS is the exhilarating inside story of the New York feminist art collective that produced “Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics” (19...
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I was a Teenage Feminist
Directed by Therese Shechter • Documentary • 62 minutes
Why is it that some young, independent, progressive women in today's society feel uncomfortable identifying with the F-word? Join filmmaker Therese Shechter as she takes a funny, moving and very personal journey into the heart of feminism. ...
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Winning Girl
Directed by Kimberlee Bassford • Documentary • 2014 • 68 minutes
From award-winning Hawaiian filmmaker Kimberlee Bassford (PATSY MINK: AHEAD OF THE MAJORITY) comes WINNING GIRL, an inspirational film that follows the four-year journey of Teshya Alo, a part-Polynesian, teenage judo and wrestling ...
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Service: When Women Come Marching Home
Directed by Marcia Rock, Patricia Lee Stotter • Documentary • 55 minutes
Women make up 15 percent of today's military. That number is expected to double in 10 years. SERVICE highlights the resourcefulness of seven amazing women who represent the first wave of mothers, daughters and sisters retur...
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Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority
Directed by Kimberlee Bassford • Documentary • 56 minutes
In 1965, Patsy Takemoto Mink became the first woman of color in the United States Congress. Seven years later, she ran for the US presidency and was the driving force behind Title IX, the landmark legislation that transformed women’s oppo...
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The Rest I Make Up
Directed by Michelle Memran • Documentary • 79 minutes
Maria Irene Fornes was one of America's greatest playwrights and most influential teachers, but many know her only as the ex-lover of writer and social critic Susan Sontag. The visionary Cuban-American dramatist constructed astonishing world...
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Bedevil
Directed by Tracey Moffatt • Drama • 1993 • 90 minutes
BEDEVIL is the stunning debut feature from Tracey Moffatt (NIGHT CRIES, NICE COLORED GIRLS) and the first feature directed by an Australian Aboriginal woman. Inspired by ghost stories she heard as a child from both her extended Aboriginal an...
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Invisible Adversaries
Directed by Valie Export • Drama • With Susanne Widl, Peter Weibel, Josef Plavec • 1976 • 108 minutes
Breaking free of conventional unities of body, space and time, this early feature by one of Europe's leading feminist filmmakers is a haunting excursion into psychic disintegration and crumbling...
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Inside Her Sex
Directed by Sheona McDonald • Documentary • With Samantha Allen, Elle Chase, Candida Royalle • 2015 • 69 minutes
While we live in a highly sexualized society, the messaging around female sexuality is distorted and rife with shame. What women should look like, who women should want, what women sh...
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Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter
Directed by Deborah Hoffmann • Documentary • 1995 • 44 minutes
With profound insight and a healthy dose of levity, COMPLAINTS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER chronicles the various stages of a mother's Alzheimer's Disease and the evolution of a daughter's response to the illness. The desire to cure the in...
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Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed
Directed by Shola Lynch • Documentary • With Shirley Chisholm, Amiri Baraka, Octavia Butler, Bobby Seale • 2004 • 77 minutes
Recalling a watershed event in US politics, this compelling documentary takes an in-depth look at the 1972 presidential campaign of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman...
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Geek Girls
Directed by Gina Hara • Documentary • With Stephanie Harvey, Anita Sengupta, Rachel Weil • 2017 • 83 minutes
Nerdy women - the "hidden half" of fan culture - open up about their lives in the world of conventions, video games, and other rife-with-misogyny pop culture touchstones. While geek commu...
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Love & Diane
Directed by Jennifer Dworkin • Documentary • 2003 • 155 minutes
Jennifer Dworkin’s groundbreaking documentary LOVE & DIANE presents a searingly honest and moving examination of poverty, welfare and drug rehabilitation in the United States today. Filmed in New York City over a five-year period, D...
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The Same Difference
Directed by Nneka Onuorah • Documentary • With Premium Steez, Danielle Brooks, Ariane Davis • 2016 • 78 minutes
THE SAME DIFFERENCE is a compelling documentary about lesbians who discriminate against other lesbians based on gender roles. Director Nneka Onuorah takes an in-depth look at the inter...
