Directed by Fronza Woods • Documentary • 1979 • 24 minutes
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, these two re-releases are no less groundbreaking today.
KILLING TIME is an offbeat, wryly humorous look at the dilemma of a would-be suicide unable to find the right outfit to die in. This fictional short examines the personal habits, socialization, and complexities of life that keep us going. 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.
“Stunning. A brutal, brilliant allegory for women and film.” —Manohla Dargis, New York Times
“Fronza Woods’s first film, “Killing Time,” from 1979, is, very simply, one of the best short films that I’ve ever seen. It’s an American counterpart to Chantal Akerman’s first film, “Saute Ma Ville,” from 1968, and it’s an even richer experience.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Directed by Daniel Byers • Documentary • With Jose de Jesus Vargas • 2021 • 22 minutes
In the remote Darién Gap rainforest, indigenous communities face the advance of loggers and cattle ranchers, an existential threat to their way of life and the ecosystem upon which they rely. When a rare Harpy...
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2004 • 8 minutes
"In Light Is Calling, a deteriorating scene from James Young's The Bells (1926) was optically reprinted and edited to Michael Gordon's seven-minute composition. The aesthetic of Morrison's film is inexorably intertwined with many of Mich...
Directed by Tracey Moffatt • Drama • 1987 • 16 minutes
This stylistically daring film audaciously explores the history of exploitation between white men and Aboriginal women, juxtaposing the “first encounter” between colonizers and native women with the attempts of modern urban Aboriginal women ...
