Friday, June 24, 2005

Women Make Movies...with disability themes

I just got around to looking at the various brochures I picked up in the book exhibit at the Berks. One is a catalog from Women Make Movies, a "distributor of independent films by and about women, with a focus on cutting-edge documentaries and intellectually challenging works in all genres." A few of the listed new and recent releases have disability themes, so I thought I'd pass along the titles here: Mama Wahunzi (Women Blacksmiths) is a film by Lawan Jirasuradej, about "three disabled East African women who defied convention to train as blacksmiths and now build wheelchairs for themselves and their community." Quick Brown Fox: An Alzheimer's Story is a film by Ann Hedreen and Rustin Thompson that's called "an incisive political exploration of the dementia industry." And Queen of the Mountain is a film by Martha Goell Lubell about Theresa Goell, an archaeologist who was hard-of-hearing, pursuing "her passion at Nemrud Dagh, a mountain in Turkey that had eluded archaeologists for centuries." Each of these films is just under an hour long, and available on VHS; the second and third are also available on DVD.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am the Director of Queen of the Mountain, a film about Theresa Goell, a pioneer woman archaeologist who was hard of hearing. I am eager to know other outlets for promoting films on disabilities (especially hearing loss) on the web. I would appreciate any suggestions that you have.
Martha Lubell

Mike Dorn said...

Dear Ms. Lubell,

There are numerous disability film festivals that take place annually. One way to keep up on these events is to subscribe to the listserv DS-HUM (Disability Studies in the Humanities). This is how I keep in touch - https://listserv.umd.edu/archives/ds-hum.html

Contact me if you need instructions on how to join this list. Mike