Women Films

A portrait of six older Americans, each with their roots in a unique cultural heritage and each with a powerful perspective on the nature of aging.

This documentary shows how an Inuit artist's drawings are transferred to stone, printed and sold. Kenojuak Ashevak became the first woman involved with the printmaking…

The cowgirls in this documentary are contemporary women aged six to sixty, who ride, rope and tough out the elements just as well as their more famous cowboy counterparts. The…

Portrait of a young Somalie woman who immigrated to Nashville Tenn when she was 10.

In 1833 Mrs. Frances Silver was hanged in Morganton, North Carolina, for the ax murder of her husband Charles. Tom Davenport's film explores the case through the singing and…

A film document of three elderly residents of Orange County, Indiana. Featured in the film are musician Lotus Dickey, clock builder and tinkerer Elmer Boyd, and self-taught artist…

THE SHAKERS traces the growth, decline, and continuing survival of this remarkable religious sect through the memories and songs of Shaker sisters in New Hampshire and Maine.

At 84, Grandma Prisbrey is a vivacious guide to her brilliant houses crammed with objects scavenged from the county dump.

On a hot July night in 1932 a black tenant farmer in Northern Virginia slipped into his landowner’s home “Edenhurst,” beat him unconscious with a piece of stove wood, and dragged…

This video examines the tradition of unaccompanied ballad singing in Madison County, North Carolina and how both documentary work and the power of family and community have…

John E. "Frail" Joines was a master tale teller from Wilkes County, N. C., on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains. His hunting tales, stories from World War II, and…

The gifted African American storyteller Louise Anderson (1921-1994) tells her family stories and folk tales, and recites poetry in this film taped in Jacksonville, North Carolina,…

Born in the coalfields of eastern Kentucky, Gunning suffered a life of bitter poverty which became the fuel for dozens of moving songs about working people, the mines, and the…

Women of Old-time Music: Tradition and Change in the Missouri Ozarks takes on the commonly-held folk music scholarship assertion that women did not widely participate in old-time…

Film of the singer/faith healer and folk artist Fannie Bell Chapman from Centreville, Mississippi. Footage includes Chapman and her family singing and praying during church…