An urgent film created for NOW! A Journal of Urgent Praxis, October 2016
For the past two years I have been filming people (mostly women and mostly strangers) reading letters sent to the editor of Ms. magazine–the first mainstream feminist magazine in the US–in the 1970s, in the cities where the letters were originally written. In this short film, four women read letters about sexual violence that were sent to Ms. between 1974-76.
Violence towards women–structural and physical–is ordinary and ongoing. It is ordinary and ongoing now, it was ordinary and ongoing in the 1990s when I went to college, it was ordinary and ongoing in the 1970s when hundreds of letters from all over the country poured into the Ms. office each month, and it was ordinary and ongoing long before that.
This is happening now, but it has also been happening forever.
Screenings: NOW! Journal Presents: Shut it Down! An Evening of Radical Cinema at Interference Archive, Brooklyn NY / Experimental Response Cinema, Austin TX / Other Cinema, San Francisco, CA / Women Media Arts and Film Festival, Sydney, Australia / Poetics and Politics of Documentary Research Symposium, University of Sussex, UK / Grrl Haus Cinema – Brattle Theater, Cambridge, MA / NOW! Journal of Urgent Praxis showcase, Dikeou Pop-Up Space, Denver, CO / Worldwide Women’s Film Festival, Scottsdale, AZ / Spoken/Unspoken: Forms of Resistance, Sesnon Gallery UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA / Women’s Film Festival, Philadelphia, PA / Headroom, Iowa City / Montreal Feminist Film Festival, Montreal, Canada
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