Fannie's Film
Women's History Month 2025
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14m
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
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