Terra Femme

Filmmaker Courtney Stephens presents a selection of “home travelogues” – amateur films shot by women in the 1920s-40s. Intended to be screened for the friends and family of their makers, these films occupy a space between home movies and accidental ethnography. They present a new type of traveler: no longer a (typically male) seeker of conquests, she might be a divorcee on a tour of biblical gardens, or a widow on a chartered cruise to the North Pole. These optical autobiographies present the world through early female filmmaker’s eyes, while raising thorny questions about the politics of the gaze.

Courtney Stephens

USA, 62’, 2021

Bio

Courtney Stephens is a filmmaker whose non-fiction and experimental films explore the contours of language, historical geography, and women’s lives. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as MoMA, the National Gallery of Art, Barbican Centre, Exploratorium, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, BAMPFA, and multiple film festivals including the Berlinale, New York Film Festival, South by Southwest, IDFA, Punto De Vista, RIDM, AFI Fest, and the Hong Kong, Mumbai, Luxembourg, San Francisco, and Camden International Film Festivals. She is the recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, the MacDowell Fellowship, and was one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. A graduate of the American Film Institute, she co-founded the Los Angeles microcinema Veggie Cloud and has curated film programs for The Getty, Museum of the Moving Image, Union Docs, and Flaherty NYC.

All Other Things Equal

A found footage documentary in which material taken from late-Soviet propaganda films about gender equality is reconstructed to imagine a world populated entirely by women.

The film depicts women performing an increasingly broad range of roles from the mundane to the extraordinary. Farmers, telecommunications experts, cosmonauts and biological scientists all appear in Tsylina’s elliptical montage.

Anya Tsyrlina

Switzerland, Russia, 20’, 2020

Bio

Anya Tsyrlina is a Siberia-born visual artist with a background in new media. Her projects combine the structural and material concerns of experimental cinema with documentary and archival practices. Tsyrlina’s moving image work has been screened at various film festivals and venues, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Viennale, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, European Media Art Festival, VIDEOEX, Bildrausch, Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, and others. She currently lives and works in Basel, Switzerland.