Documentaries
Brutal Beauty: Tales of the Rose City Rollers Roller derby is an American contact sport that has seen a nationwide revival in recent years. Brutal Beauty: Tales Of The Rose City Rollers tells the story of Portland, Oregon’s league, the Rose City Rollers. For more than a year and a half, an embedded film crew documented the thrills and spills of derby life.
Through unlimited access to team bouts, practices and the private lives of the players, Brutal Beauty puts the viewer on the inside track to this high-contact, and sometimes dangerous, sport. In their own words, the Rose City Rollers tell how roller derby saved their souls.
Covered explores the world of heavily tattooed women and female tattoo artists in the United States. Within the last decade, tattoos have exploded in popularity, becoming a commonplace adornment, as well as a popular topic for reality television (Miami Ink, Hart & Huntington, LA Ink, Marked). Once only a man’s domain, women now comprise fifty percent of all tattoo customers, and are becoming tattoo artists in larger numbers within this male-dominated industry. While the television shows focus on tattoo design selection and collector’s stories almost exclusively, Covered takes a larger, sociological perspective on what it means to be a heavily tattooed woman in today’s society—from the perspective of the women themselves. Many anthropological documentaries on the topic focus exclusively on men; therefore, Covered provides an important addition to the history of tattooing. Finally, while a great deal of the tattoo literature and documentary films focus on the so-called deviance or extreme subcultures of tattoo collecting (gangs, prisoners, soldiers, native tribal members); Covered presents the ways in which everyday heavily tattooed women must negotiate social sanctions from strangers, family, friends, and employers, in order to enjoy their love of tattoo artwork. Covered is a feature length documentary with chapters on tattoo designs, navigating social reactions, tattoo industry apprenticeship processes, the experiences of female tattooists, and tattoo conventions.
Live Nude Girls, Unite! Documentary look at the 1996-97 effort of the dancers and support staff at a San Francisco peep show, The Lusty Lady, to unionize. Angered by arbitrary and race-based wage policies, customers’ surreptitious video cameras, and no paid sick days or holidays, the dancers get help from the Service Employees International local and enter protracted bargaining with the union-busting law firm that management hires. We see the women work, sort out their demands, and go through the difficulties of bargaining. The narrator is Julia Query, a dancer and stand-up comedian who is reluctant to tell her mother, a physician who works with prostitutes, that she strips.
Pumping Iron II: The Women the film that turned the obscure sport of male bodybuilding into an overnight phenomenon and made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star, broke the ground. Now, experience PUMPING IRON II: THE WOMEN, a film that is changing the way the world views the female physique-creating “a new definition of the female form.” Join four women as they prepare for the 1983 Caesars Palace World Cup Championship: the sultry and curvaceous Rachel McLish, the current champion; the almost manly, super-muscular Bev Francis, Rachel’s toughest competition; and newcomers Lori Bowen and Carla Dunlap. Four women who have devoted their lives to the pursuit of their conception of the “perfect” female form, spending grueling hours torturing themselves on Nautilus machines and browning themselves under tanning lamps. Learn their personal struggles and public triumphs that make up their unique world as they struggle both with their bodies’ limitations and the world’s limitations on what that body ought to look like. If muscles make a man “masculine,” what do they make a woman?
Sidewalk chronicles the lives of primarily black homeless book vendors and magazine scavengers who ply their trade along 6th Avenue between 8th Street and Washington Place in New York City. By briefly comparing those book vendors with the history of book vending along the Seine in Paris, the film speaks to the efforts of North American and European societies to rid public space of the outcasts they have had a hand in producing. The film takes us into the social world of the people subsisting on the streets of New York by focusing on their work as street side booksellers, magazine vendors, junk dealers, panhandlers, and table watchers. The sidewalk becomes a site for the unfolding of these people living on the edge of society in order to give us a deeper understanding of how these individual’s are able to survive. It also becomes a site for conflicts and solidarities that encompass the vendors and local residents. We followed half dozen vendors for most of this past decade. By the end of shooting the film, their lives had taken a myriad of routes – one was hired by a local University to run a speakers series, another left to find herself working at a 7/11 convenience store, a third was deported to Jamaica where he struggles to survive without family, friends or a livelihood. Most of our characters have remained on the street continuing the daily struggle to scratch out a living on what the rest of us throw away. In this context, our main objective is to show HOW the sidewalk life works today. How do these people on the street live in a moral (and sometimes immoral) order? How do they have the ingenuity to do so in the face of exclusion and stigmatization on the basis of race and class? How does the way they do so affront the sensibilities of the working and middle classes? How do their acts intersect with a city’s mechanisms to regulate its public spaces?
Southern Comfort is a 90-minute feature-length documentary about the life of Robert Eads, a 52-year-old female to male transsexual who lives in the back hills of Georgia. “A hillbilly and proud of it,” he cuts a striking figure: sharp-tongued, bearded, tobacco pipe in hand. Robert passes so well as a male that the local Klu Klux Klan tried to recruit him to become a member.
Though his home is nestled among tranquil hills dotted with hay bales, Robert confronts a world as hostile to him as if he were an African American in the ante-bellum South. He was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, then turned away by more than two dozen doctors who feared that taking on a transgendered patient might harm their practice.
SOUTHERN COMFORT follows the final year of Robert Eads’ life. Beginning in spring, he falls deeply in love with Lola, a male-to-female. That summer, his mother and father drive ten hours to visit their “lost daughter,” a trip they know may be their last. His final dream is to make it to the Southern Comfort Conference in Atlanta, the nation’s preeminent transgender gathering. Beating the odds, he addresses a crowd of 500 and takes Lola to “The prom that never was.”
The voices in SOUTHERN COMFORT are not only rarely heard, but also are commonly thought to be non-existent. A rare blend of humor, romance, and tragedy, SOUTHERN COMFORT is the first non-fiction film to intimately tell a trans-to-trans love story, set against a disturbing tale of gender bias as it unfolds before the camera.
Voices in the Tunnels: In Search of the Mole People New York is one of the most dynamic and fastest paced cities in the world, with a complex structure representing all layers of society. At the summit are the “Kings and Queens” – The Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and Kennedys; the paragons of Western Civilization. But at the lowest level of this urban landscape lies a dark and frightening place, pulled from the pages of a macabre science fiction novel. A place which is inhabited by the “Mole People”. Voices in the Tunnels takes you on an investigative search of this urban myth – The existence of a fragmented outcast people living on the fringes of society in New York’ underbelly. People who live in dark morbid dwellings where most of us would dread visiting, let alone living. Without a map or blueprint, the film crew investigates this story, following leads based on fact and fiction, myth and reality. In our search, we traverse vast…
