Dykes, Camera, Action!

Film program, US 2018, 60 min., engl. OV

By: Caroline Berler

With: Barbara Hammer, Rose Troche, B. Ruby Rich, Su Friedrich, Cheryl Dunye, Yoruba Richen, Sarah Schulman, Jenni Olson, Desiree Akhavan

Lesbians didn‘t always get to see themselves on the screen. But starting with Stonewall, the feminist movement, and the experimental film of the 1970s to the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, lesbian filmmakers built visibility and transformed the social imagination about queerness. The story of lesbian film is not simply told here: Filmmakers like Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Rose Troche and Cheryl Dunye, the film critic B. Ruby Rich, Jenni Olson and others tell their own stories and combine personal experiences with the development of lesbian cinema illustrated by numerous film clips. “Dykes, Camera, Action!” examines the ways that women directors have contributed to this genre and emphasizes the role that the media plays in reprepresentation of sexuality and gender, underscoring the power that film has to shape our perceptions of one another.