Driven by curiosity and a passion for social justice, Emmy-nominated filmmaker Cynthia Lowen uses the power of story to investigate difficult issues that often go overlooked; her debut documentary feature, 2011’s “Bully”, investigated a crisis of suicide motivated by bullying in American schools. It was nominated for two […]
February 2021 Cinema Femme had the honor of speaking with documentarian Dawn Porter about her impactful films. We bring back our interview with her to celebrate Juneteenth weekend. *Not an updated biography, biography from February 2021. Learn more about Dawn Porter’s latest work here. DAWN […]
We had the opportunity to speak with activist and filmmaker Maria Judice about her directorial feature debut “Elephant,” which will have its in-person premiere at the Ann Arbor Film Festival on Sunday, 3/27 at 3:15 PM ET. You can watch it at the fest virtually now. Buy […]
For Women’s History Month and Trans Visibility Day approaching on March 31, we bring back our interview from the Chicago International Film Festival in October 2020. We are proud to support “Mama Gloria” – an intimate profile of Chicago’s trailblazing Black transgender icon and activist […]
We featured this interview on July 1st, 2020 before John Lewis passed. Dawn Porter won Mind the Gap (California Film Institute and Mill Valley Film Festival) Documentarian of the Year on 11/25/20. Black Lives Matter. There is a man named John Lewis, who has fought […]
I have found myself in the midst of discovering another hero of mine. Shalini Kanyayya is my hero because she elevates, through her own work, trailblazing womxn in the AI industry. “Coded Bias” follows Joy Buolamwini through her investigation of implicit bias in face recognition […]
It is difficult for me to write an introduction for this piece, not because of the amazing interview I had with Maya Zinshtein about her documentary “‘Til Kingdom Come’, but how I’m having to grapple with some of the sad truths that my religious background […]
We had the opportunity to chat with Ukrainian filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk, director of the successful documentary “The Earth is Blue as an Orange”. The movie follows the lives of single mother Anna, her two daughters, her old mother and two sons in the “red zone” […]
“Yellow Rose” is the timely story of a Filipina teen from a small Texas town who fights to pursue her dreams as a country music performer while having to decide between staying with her family or leaving the only home she has known. I was fortunate […]
I had no particular interest in crime aside from reading the occasional Nancy Drew book growing up. Yet two days after the killing, without telling anyone, I walked to the spot near our house where Kathleen had been attacked. On the ground I saw pieces […]
“Every image or sound is a vessel for emotion: rapture, despair, sensuousness, fury, a combination of these. That makes cinema a kind of legerdemain: the art of sculpting such seemingly artificial elements to create a singular, genuine emotional experience.” –excerpt from Isabel Sandoval’s director’s statement […]
Following the Women’s March in January 2017, I was witnessing a power in the collective, a power I hadn’t seen before in my lifetime. Though I didn’t have a name for this power, I knew that it represented some “fight”, some unrest with our country’s […]