In addition to her documentaries Still Doing It: The Intimate Lives of Women Over 65, and Suicide On Campus, a web documentary produced in conjunction with The New York Times Magazine, Deirdre Fishel‘s previous film CARE peeled back the curtain of a topic Americans often avert their eyes away from, the largely hidden world of … READ MORE

By Lennlee Keep There isn’t much the whole world seems to agree on, but I have yet to meet a person who doesn’t love Dolly Parton. She’s funny, glamorous, famous, and fabulous. Oh, and she sings too. For over 50 years, she’s been writing songs that can bring you to your feet or bring you … READ MORE

By Marlen Komar In the early 1970s, a group of Boston secretaries came together to improve the working conditions in their offices. Tired of low pay, lack of advancement opportunities, and constant sexual harassment, they created the group 9to5, which would eventually grow into a nationwide revolution that would change the American workplace for women. … READ MORE

Julia Reichert and her filmmaking partner and life partner Steve Bognar, have been making documentaries for a long while. Most recently, in 2020, the team won the Academy Award for American Factory, about the reopening of a shuttered auto factory in Ohio. But their incredible dossier goes back to the 1970s — Julia’s first film, … READ MORE

Filmmaker Yu Gu was born in Chongqing, China, raised in Vancouver, Canada, and found her way to the University of Southern California film program. Her films, like the feature documentary that she co-directed Who is Arthur Chu?, which won two festival grand jury awards and was broadcast on WORLD Channel in 2018, explore intersections between … READ MORE

Erika Cohn has made powerful documentaries for Independent Lens before and is no stranger to telling intimate, surprising stories in tense environments: her Peabody Award-winning film The Judge showed Shari’a law in a new light to Western eyes, through the story of the first-ever female judge in Palestine’s religious courts; and the Utah native filmmaker … READ MORE

What does “representation” mean in the midst of a historically tense election year?  In her film Represent, filmmaker Hillary Bachelder sought to show the universal struggle to redefine repressive expectations for women in politics with a look at three women running for office in a male-dominated world. Originally from Maine, Bachelder went to Chicago for … READ MORE

Recorder filmmaker Matt Wolf talks about the enormous undertaking it was to comb through Marion Stokes’ archives and getting her family to tell her remarkable story. READ MORE

Taking risks is nothing new for Chinese filmmaker Nanfu Wang. Her previous documentary I Am Another You, which was a SXSW Jury Award-winner and aired on Independent Lens, involved her having to live on the streets with the homeless subject of her film, and prior to that she became a target of the Chinese government … READ MORE

By  Kemberlie Spivey Australian-born independent filmmaker Patricia Zagarella has been creating documentaries for over ten years and co-produced the Emmy-award winning documentary Baring It All. That film followed fashion photographer David Jay into the worlds of four young breast cancer survivors, exploring their journeys as they were photographed for the SCAR Project. Patricia made her … READ MORE

By Kristal Sotamayor The one-child policy was introduced to China in 1979, written into the national constitution in 1982, and subsequently ended in 2015. Over the 36 years of the policy, entire generations have been marked by the effects of the state’s control on women’s reproductive rights. The films One Child Nation and Leftover Women both … READ MORE

Israeli filmmakers Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia have had films air on international television as well as here in the U.S. on HBO, MTV, Sundance, and PBS (Medalia has received four Emmy nominations and won a Peabody Award), and both women studied in the United States. So how did they end up making a film … READ MORE