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TERRA FEMME

By Courtney STEPHENS

LIGHTDOX - as SALES All rights, World

Documentary - Completed 2021

Comprised of rare amateur travelogues shot by women between the 1920s-50s, Terra Femme weaves together questions of mobility, the gaze, and early female filmmaking, in a film essay about past worlds and cinematic excavation.

- Year of production
- 2021
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- USA
- Languages
- ENGLISH
- Duration
- 62 mn
- Director(s)
- Courtney STEPHENS
- Producer(s)
- Courtney STEPHENS (Jacket Weather)
- Synopsis
- Terra Femme is an essay film comprised of amateur travelogues filmed by women in the 1920s-1950s. With a score by Sarah Davachi, the film weaves between geographical essay, personal inquiry, and historical speculation, examining these films as both private documents and accidental ethnographies. The films present a new type of traveler: no longer a male seeker of conquests, she might be a divorcee on a tour of biblical gardens, or a widow on a cruise to the North Pole.
  
  Representing the world through women’s eyes, the films raise questions about female representation in the archive, the role of amateurism in early non-fiction filmmaking, and the politics of the Western gaze. At once a film about longing for past worlds through cinematic excavation, this force flows in both directions: as women from the past search for self-making in the act of looking.