‘Women Direct’ Slates Festival and Symposium

The Women Direct film, video, and digital media series will celebrate its 20th anniversary with a weeklong festival and symposium. Rather than the customary semester-long schedule of screenings and speakers featuring independent women artists, the series will bring together April 2--7 a rich variety of feminist media makers, scholars, critics, and activists for a program of screenings, lectures, panel discussions, and master classes. All of the events are free, and all but the master classes and two Cinemapolis screenings are open to the public.

The keynote speaker will be Deepa Mehta, who is serving as the first James B. Pendleton artist in residence in the Roy H. Park School of Communications. An internationally renowned Canadian-Indian writer, producer, and director, she is primarily known for her award-winning narrative features that explore the intersections between nationality, gender, and sexual identity. The symposium will screen her highly regarded Fire (1996) and Earth (1998), in a special collaboration with independent theater Cinemapolis in downtown Ithaca. Free tickets for these two films --- limited to members of the Ithaca College Community --- are available from Barbara Terrell, 357 Park Hall, bterrell@ithaca.edu. All other events will be held on campus.

Other featured guests include Los Angeles--based experimental photographer and filmmaker Sharon Lockhart; film scholar Sharon Willis, author of High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Films; and author and physician Abraham Verghese. Fourteen screenings and presentations will feature works by a number of artists, while roundtable topics will include "Girls around the World," "Installing Feminism," and "Feminism across Borders."

Women Direct is the longest-running feminist film series on the East Coast. It was begun in 1982 to serve as a counterpart to the male-dominated Hollywood film industry by showcasing what had become a thriving independent women’s cinema. Two organizers of that inaugural year --- professor of cinema and photography Patricia Zimmermann and assistant professor of writing Barbara Adams --- continue to organize and program Women Direct annually. Joining them in putting together this year’s event is Christina Lane, the James B. Pendleton fellow in cinema and photography in the Park School.

The festival and symposium are principally sponsored by the James B. Pendleton Endowment in the Park School. Additional Ithaca College support comes from the Office of the President; Office of the Provost; and Departments of Cinema and Photography, Television-Radio, Writing, and Health Services Administration; as well as from the Electronic Arts Program of the Experimental Television Center (funded by the New York State Council on the Arts) and the Media Alliance.