The New Mexico Film Foundation is sponsoring an event that celebrates women and feminist progress in the movie-making industry.
The event will be hosted by Ariel Dougherty, who is an independent filmmaker who uses her films to advocate for feminist culture. She publishes and produces her movies through an organization she co-founded in 1972 called Women Make Movies. At the time movies with female protagonists were rare and close to no women were directors.
The cinema will be showing select films directed by Dougherty. After that, Dougherty and her business-partner Paige will discuss their reasons behind launching Women Make Movies. They started the business in an economically mixed and multiracial part of Manhattan where they taught film skills to the community. This was one of the first times concerns affecting women such as marriage and shortened careers were captured on film. Decades later, these films and stories still resonate with their audiences.
Poster printing for the screening shows that several films will be shown, including films about a party that celebrates the election of the nation’s first female president, a group of women artists who collaborate in order to improve as a collective, and one film that was shot with an entirely female crew. Some of these films were released more than 50 years ago.
The screening is scheduled for March 31 at the Guild Cinema in Albuquerque, starting at 6:00 PM.
