Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi and Shilyh Warren
The six documentary films presented here provide a tiny glimpse into a rich set of 21st-century documentary works made by and about women. They are a sample list of various case studies that some of the contributors to the new edited book, Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2025), discuss in their chapters. The volume itself consists of 12 chapters written by a diverse range of documentary practitioners and authors from around the world, who reflect on the state of women’s contemporary documentary practices within a global context. The chapters investigate filmmaking practices from regions such as East Africa, Latin America, South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. They also examine decolonial practices in the Global North based on Indigenous filmmaking and feminist documentary institutions such as Women Make Movies. In doing so, they assess the global, institutional, political, and artistic factors that have shaped women’s documentary practices in the 21st century, and their implications for scholarly debates regarding women’s authorship, political subjectivity, and documentary representation.
The sample list presented here showcases the diversity, significance, and richness of women’s documentary practices and activism within a global context, and the editors hope that it will encourage readers to engage with these films and also read the edited volume for in-depth discussions of these and other works featured in the anthology.
A Lullaby under the Nuclear Sky (dir. Tomoko Kana, 2016, Japan)
After interviewing residents in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe in radioactively contaminated areas of Fukushima to which access had been restricted, Kana Tomoko, the filmmaker, discovered that she was pregnant. Centered around her experience of pregnancy and her constant anxiety regarding the potential effects of radiation, she presents her body as having become inextricably intertwined with the sociopolitical situation surrounding the nuclear disaster. This documentary’s significance lies in its exploration of the networked capacity of the personalized corporeal experience, affective ties, and documentary media against the backdrop of post-disaster society.
Stream the film here.
Mihin Sutta, Mihin Jibon/The Women Weavers of Assam (dir. Aparna Sharma, 2019, India)
Mihin Sutta, Mihin Jibon focuses on the craft, labour and the everyday lives of a group of women weavers in India’s northeastern state of Assam. The weavers belong to a non-profit collective called Tezpur District Mahila Samiti (TDMS), which was founded a century ago by women activists and Gandhian freedom fighters. The TDMS weavers preserve traditional motifs and methods of Assamese weaving, which have been declining since the introduction of mechanized cloth production in India. The film blends montages of weaving with the weavers’ accounts of their personal experiences, generating an evocative representation of the environment and the rhythms of the TDMS, and the cultural significance of handloom weaving as a craft and industry in Assam.
The film embodies a collaboration between women subjects and a woman filmmaker. It illustrates an aesthetic for depicting women’s knowledge and experiences.
The film is available on Kanopy in the USA. At UCLA the film can be accessed here. The filmmaker will also be able to provide a private viewing link on Vimeo upon request that can be directed to: [email protected]
Como el cielo después de llover/The Calm After the Storm (dir. Mercedes Gaviria, 2020, Colombia/Argentina)
After studying abroad, Mercedes returns to Colombia to work on the next film by her father, the famous Víctor Gaviria. Fluctuating between admiration and reproach, Mercedes constructs a private diary that goes beyond familial conflicts to question the place of women in the film world, which is still strongly ingrained with a patriarchal mindset.
Como el cielo después de llover is a first-person documentary that draws a family portrait at the crossroads between a daughter’s love for her father and a woman’s aspirations in a male-dominated industry. Víctor Gaviria is recognized as one of Colombia’s best-known film directors. His films portray different types of violence that take place in Medellín’s most deprived communities and are performed by non-professional actors. When his daughter Mercedes decided to become a filmmaker, instead of following her father’s footsteps, she decided to build a career of her own, away from his shadow. In the making of this film, she questions her father’s entitlement to film stories that he has never experienced, particularly those related to sexual violence against poor women. Como el cielo después de llover belongs to a growing corpus of Latin American documentaries that employs the first person to explore stories about vulnerability, pain, and desire as experienced by the filmmakers and their families. Many of these films are articulated from the daughter/filmmaker’s perspective and address the relationship with the father. This perspective mobilizes a gender identity to break long-lasting silences around patriarchal ubiquity and heteronormative regimes and is giving rise to a genealogy of feminist films.
Stream the film here. More information here.
nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up (dir. Tasha Hubbard, 2019, Canada)
The central focus of this film is the protracted quest for justice by a Saskatchewan Cree family, led by their mother, when her youngest son is shot in the back of the head after entering the yard of a neighbouring farm, seeking help with a flat tire. The acquittal of the farmer and demonising of the youth as potential thieves attracted international attention and set the family on a quest to have the racism in Canada’s legal system recognized that would take them from their home province to the national capital and finally to the United Nations. Celebrated Cree filmmaker and university professor Tasha Hubbard weaves a powerful story that combines the quest for justice for the young man Colten Boushie with Hubbard’s own story of colonisation, raising her son and nephew to have pride in their Indigenous roots in a community divided into two camps – Indigenous and settler. The authority of the maternal line is extended to a deliberation of our relationship with mother earth, without whose sustenance we would all die. The film is a powerful argument for the reinstatement of the authority of the maternal, something Indigenous women lost through colonisation, and a call to actively honour the land we live on as a life-giving, maternal force that we must respect and care for if we are to survive.
Stream the film here. Interviews with the film’s director, Tasha Hubbard, can be watched here and here.
Carne (dir. Camila Kater, 2019, Brazil)
In Carne (2019), Camila Kater’s directorial debut, five diverse women reflect on their relationships with their bodies in relation to societal pressures and expectations. The film combines documentary interviews with various animation techniques (stop motion, 2D watercolor drawings, digital 2D, and animation direct on film) to achieve the familiar and urgent goals of social-issue documentaries: to give voice, to raise awareness, and to bridge the personal with the political. Kater uses the metaphor of carne or flesh to subdivide the film into five chapters, each titled after familiar terms used to describe the cooking temperatures of meat: raw, medium rare, medium, medium well, and well done. By creating parallels between women’s bodies and terms of preference for cooked flesh, Kater draws our attention both to the idea of preference and to the objectification of women’s bodies. For whom do women manipulate their bodies? How do external pressures and preferences determine women’s sense of worth and value? Carne emphasizes forms of discursive and epistemic violence—the oppressive norms about beauty, health, and desirability that women face in the home, school, medical establishment, and the media. Yet Kater’s film also helps us understand how ideas and stereotypes take hold of women in both psychic and physical ways and sometimes lead to violence from those who feel threatened.
Watch the film on Kanopy here.
Locarno Int’l Film Festival interview with director Camila Kater available here.
NY Times Opinion Videos available here and here.
VARIETY review of the film is here.
Foragers (dir. Jumana Manna, 2022, Palestine)
This docu-fiction – directed by the Berlin-based Palestinian multidisciplinary artist Jumana Manna – features the artist’s family who are avid foragers of the wild-growing leafy greens ‘akkoub and za’atar. Foragers portrays these two native plants as the medium on which the relationship between Palestinians and their land clashes with the absurdity of the prohibitive laws imposed on the Palestinian residents under the guise of nature preservation in Palestine/Israel. Foragers documents the process of foraging, preparing, and consuming the plants but it also incorporates fictional reenactments of court hearings in which Palestinians talk back in a comical tone against the absurdity of criminalizing one of the simplest and most basic human activities of eating wild leafy greens. Exhibited within Between Women Filmmakers Caravan, this film is representative of the organization’s unwavering transnational solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Moreover, Foragers mode of production and narrative structure adheres to what Manal Hamza coined as Arabyya epistemology. This model of knowledge production resists gender and settler-colonial oppressions by fostering Haki (storytelling).
More about Foragers and its previous and upcoming screenings can be found on director Jumana Manna’s website.
In 2022, Foragers was screened at MoMA PS1 followed by a conversation between Manna, the curator Ruba Katrib and activist Rabbi Eghbariah. Read excerpts of this conversation here. Marking the screening of Foragers at MoMA PS1, chef Mina Stone issued a Whipped Feta with Za’atar recipe.
This playlist reflects the work of the contributors of the volume, Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2025). Thanks to the following authors for their contribution to this playlist:
- Wakae Nakane is PhD Candidate at the University of Southern California. Her chapter, “Politicizing Familial Space: Women’s Post-Fukushima Documentaries as the Creation of Counterpublics” is published in Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2025).
- Aparna Sharma is Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her chapter, “Making Documentary Media: Approaches to the Deep Image” co-authored with Priya Sen, is published in Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2025).
- Lorena Cervera is a Senior Lecturer in Film Production at Arts University Bournemouth. Her chapter, “Affective Relations and First-Person Enunciation: Daughters/Filmmakers Reformulate the Latin American Documentary” is published in Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2025).
- Gail Vanstone is Associate Professor at York University. Her chapter, “Are We on the Same Page Here?: Moving Beyond “Us” and “Them” in nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up and Kimmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy” is published in Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2025).
- Christine Veras, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor at the Harry W. Jr. Bass School of Arts, Humanities and Technology at UT Dallas. Her co-authored chapter, “Feminist Animated Documentary: Ways of Confronting Violence against Women” is published in Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2025).
- Shilyh Warren, Ph.D., is Associate Professor at the Harry W. Jr. Bass School of Arts, Humanities and Technology at UT Dallas. Her co-authored chapter, “Feminist Animated Documentary: Ways of Confronting Violence against Women” is published in Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2025).
- Amal Shafek is an independent scholar and filmmaker based in Egypt. Her chapter, “Caravan: Rerouting Transnational Feminist Collaboration Networks” is published in Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2025).
🙏