Women (many of them lesbian) artists, writers, photographers, designers, and adventurers settled in Paris between the wars. They embraced France, some developed an ex-pat culture, and most cherished a way of life quite different than the one left behind.
Feb 1996
This profile of storied trumpeter of jazz, Tiny Davis, and her cohort pianist-drummer, Ruby Lucas, is an amalgam of artifacts about the two women, accompanied with poetry by Cheryl Clarke.
Feb 1989
This fairy-tale-like drama, based on a 1904 short story by American poet and feminist author Renée Vivien, tells two opposing versions of the same narrative: one told verbally by Pierre Lenoir, a male narrator at a Victorian dinner party; the other told visually through the behavior of an unnamed woman who meets him on a fantasy cargo boat. The intercutting of the two stories creates a tension between the different world views of the woman and the man.
Jan 1994
This documentary contains dramatized episodes about the lives of Erika and Klaus Mann, the brilliant children of German writer Thomas Mann.
Apr 2001
A history of the political and social repression carried out by the ruthless regime of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco between 1936 and 1975 that focuses on the lives of gays and lesbians during those dark years and the death of the Spanish gay poet Federico García Lorca.
Mar 2018
Greta's Girls lovingly depicts the quotidian moments in the domestic life of a lesbian couple and their dog in New York City. Greta's Girls is one of the first independent short films to focus on lesbians.
Jun 1978
In the winter of 1977, Liz left her husband and four small children at home in Australia and came to New York City on a Fulbright award. There she met Kate, a paradigm-shifting feminist scholar, and they fell in love at first sight. Back then, it was a given that any lesbian mother was deemed unfit to raise her own children. But Liz’s newfound passion and self-discovery gave her the courage to fight for her kids, and for herself. In “Love Letters,” the traditional patriarchal values of the era, in which women and children were seen as possessions of men, collide head on with the newly energized, audacious lesbian feminist movement. The highly charged custody case uses courtroom line-drawing animation and verbatim testimony to tell a dramatic story of social ostracism and personal triumph. This is the story of a blazing lesbian love affair, begun in the revolutionary feminist ferment of 1970’s New York City and still going strong almost 50 years later.
Mar 2024
From the Piney Woods School in the Mississippi Delta to the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York City, this toe-tapping music film tells the story of the swinging, multi-racial all-women jazz band of the 1940s.
Sep 1986
A lyrical film portrait of the once famous, and now, largely forgotten jazz vocalist Maxine Sullivan.
Jan 1990