Presented in collaboration with Penn's Department of Cinema & Media Studies and Public Trust
The Woman's Film
Dir. Jennifer Gauthier, 1971, 40 min.
Inside Women Inside
Dir. Christine Choy and Cynthia Maurizio, 1978, 21 min.
As a mode of action and as a way of thinking, feminism constantly interrogates truth. Whose actions, language, and experience constitute truth? How would/could a feminist truth be gathered, recorded, presented, and claimed? These questions erupt in two classic feminist documentaries produced at bookends of the 1970s: The Woman’s Film (1971) and Inside Women Inside (1978). Screened together, we hope these films will facilitate a conversation about the relationship between feminism, activism, documentary practice, and truth.
Screening followed by a conversation with Shilyh Warren, Associate Professor of Visual and Performing Arts & Film Studies, University of Texas, and Asher Guthertz, Ph.D Student, Cinema & Media Studies, University of Pennsylvania.
Shilyh Warren is an associate professor of Film Studies at UT Dallas and the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies in the Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. She is the author of Subject to Reality: Women and Documentary (2019) and the co-editor with Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi of Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (2025). Her research and publications in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Signs, and Camera Obscura focus primarily on documentary film and feminist studies. Other projects include research on the politics of sexuality and film theory, which she writes about in “Revolution is Another Climax,” Women & Language (2021) and “Sexuality and Discourses of Care in Feminist Documentary,” Feminist Media Histories (2023).
Asher Guthertz is a PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an educator and scholar from California whose research interests include media infrastructures, alternative film exhibition, bureaucratic media, and the project of film education.
