In this selection of experimental, documentary, and ethnographic films, women filmmakers employ different stylistic approaches and modes of address—often asking new questions about family and community—to explore women’s experience and work. Karba’s First Years, shot in Bali in the mid-1930s by Margaret Mead and Gregrory Bateson and returned to in the 1950s, examines childhood development in a pioneering example of using visual footage in anthropological research. Selbe: One Among Many documents the daily life of a Senegalese mother, through which Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye reveals the village women’s collectivity. In These Hands, Tanzanian filmmaker Flora M’mbugu-Schelling records a day in the life of Mozambican women refugees working in a Tanzanian quarry and, without narration or plot, critiques the international economic order. Marwa Arsanios’s Who Is Afraid of Ideology? Part 2 links ecology, feminism, and collective organization through conversations and encounters with members of an all-women community in Jinwar, Syria. 

— Kathy Geritz