More Media Resources: Films

I've just added these to my locate and watch list...

V-Day's Own DVD: Until the Violence Stops - V-Day's Emmy award-winning documentary Until The Violence Stops with additional scenes and content added including segments on Juarez, Mexico and Afghanistan. (I've ordered this and will watch it once I arrive in the states for my holiday.)

The Vagina Monologues - the HBO special

Women Make Movies's suggestions - films made by women that address issues of violence against women, including Senorita Extraviada, the documentary about missing and murdered women in Juarez.

Eat Drink, Man Woman

Honoring Our Voices - six Native women talk about the choices they have made to overcome the hardships of family violence and end the cycle of abuse and silence

Letter to My Mother - is a short film made on digital video about the transformative effect that the women's march had on young feminists. I use the story of myself and three of my friends (women shortly out of college and hungry to understand the real world and their place in it) as a template for looking at how the energy and inclusion of direct action made young women, finally, feel like a part of the feminist movement not a by product.

Maya is a powerful film by filmmaker Digvijay Singh that depicts community silence around violence against young girls and the power of a young boys questioning. It could be a way to open up stimulating discussion on the involvement of men in the movement to end violence against women.

Ophelia's Opera, Abiola Abrams is a feminist filmmaker based in Harlem, New York. Her objective is to use film as a medium to teach and empower while entertaining. Her short film Ophelias Opera, of which there are 2 versions (15 minutes & 28 minutes), is an experimental film about a woman who uses voodoo to take revenge escape and an abusive relationship. Knives in My Throat, a 54 minute documentary tells the story of a self-abusive manic depressive young woman who seeks to escape through hip hop poetry. Abiola Abrams aims to give a voice to the voiceless and discuss the un-discussable using film as a vehicle.

Rape Is... - a documentary about a human rights outrage that leaves millions of women, children and men in a state of terror and pain

Real Women Have Curves - the story of a first generation Mexican-American girl balancing her mainstream ambitions and her cultural heritage

Soldier's Girl (2003) - starring Troy Garrity, son of Jane Fonda, is the true story of a young soldier beaten to death for falling in love with a transgendered nightclub performer. Our monologue "They Beat the girl out of my Boy" was written by Eve after meeting and talking to the woman whose story this movie is based on. It won a Peabody Award and was nominated for 10 other awards including 3 Golden Globes, 2 Emmys and a GLAAD.

The Day I Became a Woman This film has won many international prizes at Toronto, Venice, and Chicago film festivals and was heralded as one of the most brilliant works of art by director Ms. Marziyeh Meshkini. It is a series of three vignettes and portrays Iranian women at three distinct phases in their lives. The stories are very poignant and powerful representations of the cultural biases against women in Iran.

Warrior Marks - poetic and political film by Pratibha Parmar, executive produced by Alice Walker about female genital mutilation (I have the book by Walker and Parmar about their experience of making the film called Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women.)

list source: V-Spot for V-Day campaign organisers

Eve Ensler's Response to WHO Statistics

Written on November 24, 2005 (Thanksgiving Day in the USA)
I spent my morning reading the World Health Organization (WHO) Multi-Country Study On Women’s Health and Domestic Violence against Women which interviewed 24,000 women in 10 countries. I was full of gratitude for this documentation – released on Thanksgiving Day, which is essential and long overdue.

The WHO report provides a statistical picture of the violence that is happening to women and its long-term impact on their health and well-being.

Unfortunately, this report mirrors my experience over the last decade. When I first started performing “The Vagina Monologues,” everywhere I went in the world women would line up after the show. At first I was thrilled, thinking I would hear mysterious and delicious stories of their great sex lives. There were some of those, but the majority of the women who lined up were there to tell me about how they’d been raped or slapped or beaten or incested, and how that experience had forever changed them.

Like most of those surveyed in the WHO report, these women had not told anyone their stories before. I had known of course that there was violence against women. I was not naïve. I had survived terrible sexual and physical violence myself at the hands of my own father. What I did not know until that tour was the epidemic proportions of this violence. This realization gave birth to V-Day, a worldwide movement that has spread in 8 years to 81 countries and raised over $30 million dollars for local groups working to stop violence against women. The work has since taken me to over forty countries. Whether I am on a college campus in the US listening to the story of a young girl who has been date raped, or in a shelter in Zagreb for women who were beaten by their husbands after the war, or in Juarez searching for the bones of missing young poor woman, or in Islamabad where I sit with a woman whose melted face is the result of an acid burning by her husband, I am struck by the global and personal devastation of this violence.

What is most troubling about the report is the normalization of this violence. How women and men have come to expect and accept this brutality as a part of daily life. How a slap to a woman’s cheek or a man’s fist in her face, is not considered outrageous or extraordinary. How we do not value women, hold them sacred, understand that to honor their beings and bodies is tantamount to honoring life itself.

What the WHO report reinforces for me is that addressing violence against women is central to everything. Violence is the tyrannical mechanism which undoes women and keeps them powerless and in their place. It is not inevitable. We can stop it. In addressing it, we will have to address gender inequality, poverty, education, human rights, and HIV/AIDS.

I applaud the World Health Organization for this excellent report. Sadly statistics may be what it takes to compel governments and individuals to fight to protect women. It seems to me that one abused woman would be enough to call out the community. If the WHO report is right, and our experience would suggest it is, that one out of two women are beaten in many countries, it seems this might be an indication of an emergency.

Billions of dollars are spent every year on homeland and national security. How ironic that it is in the home where women are most insecure, where they are abused, beaten and murdered, and where there is little to no money spent protecting them. Women are the primary resource of this planet. Their safety, their empowerment, their freedom is a guarantee for all our futures.

-Eve Ensler is a Playwright (“The Vagina Monologues,” “The Good Body”) and the Founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls

[source]

A Soundtrack for V-Day

taken from the vspot...how many times have you listened to these songs and just not thought about it; and how many times have you listened to these songs and that's all you could hear.

Alix Olson - "Armpit Hair"; "Cunt Country" (spoken word); "Built Like That"

Alanis Morisette - "Still" from Dogma Soundtrack [lyrics]

Amanda Marshall - "Everybody's Got A Story"

Amy Ray - "Lucystoners" - about an early 1900's feminist named Lucy Stone

Amy Sky - "Phenomenal Women" (lyrics by Maya Angelou)

Angie Stone - "Sunshine"

Ani DiFranco - Ani sings about a wide variety of women's issues, including rape and abortion (specifically recommended include "Blood in the Boardroom", "Not A Pretty Girl", "Fixing Her Hair", "The Story", "Make Them Apologize", "I'm No Heroine", "Roll With It", "The Slant", "Lost Woman Song", "Gratitude", "Out Of Range", "Letter To A John", "Angry Anymore", "32 Flavors" ... ) [lyrics]

Annie Lennox - "Why"

Aretha Franklin - "Respect"

Bikini Kill - "Liar"; "Star Bellied Boy"; "Suck My Left One"; "White Boy" (other songs deal with rape too)

Bitch and Animal - "Pussy Manifesto" from What's that Smell (unlisted). [lyrics]

Cassandra Wilson - "Sankofa"; "Redbone"

Christina Aguilera - "Can't Hold Us Down"; "Beautiful"

Cowboy Junkies - "Hunted" from Pale Sun, Crescent Moon - about living in fear as a woman [lyrics]

Cyndi Lauper - "She-Bop"; "Sally's Pigeons"

Dar Williams - "When I Was a Boy" (about blurred gender roles/identity as a child); "As Cool As I Am"; "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono"

Destiny's Child - "Independent Women, Part 1"

Dixie Chicks - "Earl Had to Die" - about domestic violence

Ember Swift - "Freak"; "Swooshi Swooshi" - about shaving

Eve - "Love is Blind" - a friend recounting the abuse of a friend after the friend is killed by her "partner"

Fiona Apple - "Sullen Girl" - about rape

Gloria Gaynor - "I Will Survive"

Heather Headley - "Sista Girl"

India Arie - "Video"; "Brown Skin"

Jamie Anderson - "I Wanna Be a Straight Guy" - saterical look at hetero/male privilege

Jill Sobule - "I Kissed a Girl"; "Karen by Night"

Joan Baez - "Imagine" (cover of John Lennon's)

Katy Moffat - "Ain't I a Woman" - based on Sojourner Truth's speech

Kinnie Starr - "Praise"

Lauryn Hill - "Just Like Water"; "Zion" - about the joy of the birth of her child; "That Thing"

Madonna - "What It Feels Like (For A Girl)"

Melissa Ferrick - "Freedom"; "Drive"

Meshell N'Degeocello - "Beautiful"

Miriam Makeba - "Masakhane" - fantastic South African women singer

Nina Simone - "Four Women" - about four black womyn, each one a little further along in history and different

Pamela Means - "Uncle"

Queen Latifah - "UNITY"

Saffire: The Uppity Blues Women - "1-800-799-7233" (encouraging womyn who have been the victims of abuse to reach out to the abuse hotline number, cleverly used in the title and refrain of the song); "Bitch with a Bad Attitude" (Encouraging womyn to accept and love thier inner bitch and how it makes people stand correct); "Wild Women Never Get the Blues"; "There's Lightning in These Thunder Thighs". [Saffire is a fabulous three-woman jazz and blues band, playing insightful blues about woman-centered issues including: abuse, rape, domestic violence, empowered sexuality, race, and class.]

Sarah Jones - "Your Revolution"

Sinead o'Connor - "The Healing Room"; "Thank You"

Sleater Kinney - "A Real Man"

Suzanne Vega - "My Name Is Luka" - about a husband beating his wife and people around not doing a thing

Sweet Honey and the Rock - their entire catalog is woman-centered and they have multiple songs about resisting violence; "No Mirror's in my Nana's House"; "Run" - specifically about domestic violence; "Oughta Be A Woman"; "Soundbite From Beijing"

TLC - "Unpretty"

Tori Amos - "Icicle"; "Me and a Gun"

Tracy Chapman - "Behind the Wall" from Tracy Chapman - a song about domestic violence [lyrics]; "At This Point in My Life"

The Wyrd Sisters - "Warrior" on Inside the Dreaming