Film Categories: Race + Ethnicity

  • Porcaria

    The year is 1968 and Joaquim and Amalia Quinteiro are just your average young new immigrant couple, drawing blood over money matters and overdosing on culture shock. Into their nest of perfect domestic bliss flies the ever popular, handsome young university student border, Joao. Amalia gets a job and Joaquim’s already flagging machismo shoots off the exit ramp. Perhaps only Joao’s devilish derriere can buttress this poor male ego. A love triangle of unusual proportions, “Porcaria” demonstrates a total lack of resistence to new world charms that has the fish jumping off the walls.

  • Pretending We Were Indians

    “This short animated film represents the recollections of a woman whose native ancestry was obscured by the social mores of the recent past. Tracing fragments of information as she walks, the woman speculates on what really happened to her ancestors and herself.” – Frances Leeming

  • Puamana

    Aloha! This gentle portrait of Auntie Irmgard Farden Aluli, one of Hawaii’s best-loved composers, focuses on Hawaiian women’s contributions to family structure, art, music and dance. An intimate glimpse into the real culture of the islands.

  • Re-entry: Stories of Six Women

    Six women of different ethnic and economic backgrounds, ranging in age from early 30s to 60s, tell their individual stories of returning to school or job training, of juggling child raising and house keeping with school and jobs, of support by family and the support they feel is needed for women like them. Must women be superwomen to find fulfillment? These women’s stories are interwoven to produce inspiring and sobering reflections on many women’s lives. Produced for the Santa Cruz Chapter of the Older Women’s League (OWL).

  • Bangs

    A comedy about a young Chinese-Canadian girl obsessed with her large egg-like forehead. “A deftly funny work.” – Peter Goddard,The Toronto Star

  • Reel

    “Reel” is a meticulously crafted experimental narrative from a young Norwegian filmmaker – a film poem. An old woman is sitting by the reel and working with her yarn, her mind flows between different stages in a woman’s life.

  • Bapuji – The Path of Love

    A film portrait of Swami Shri Kirpalvanadji, one of the greatest living masters of yoga in the world today. For the past thirty years Bapuji, as he is affectionately called by those who follow his teaching, has spent ten hours of every day in deep meditation. His unique journey through the struggles of the spiritual path have brought him to a stage of consciousness that yogis say occurs only once every five hundred years. This is one of the first films to reveal the daily practices of a great master – practices usually carried out in solitude. His life and…

  • Sally’s Beauty Spot

    In this lively, intimate film, a large black mole above an Asian woman’s breast serves as a metaphor for cultural and sexual difference. Off-screen women’s voices and scenes form the 1960 Hollywood miscegenation melodrama “The World of Suzie Wong” counterpoint Sally’s own interracial encounters and emerging self-awareness. A stylish and playfully impressionistic account of racial expectations and role-playing which critiques Western stereotypes of Asian femininity. “…challenges fetishistic and colonialist forms of representation, wittily tracing a character’s move from stereotypical object to sexual subject.” – Laura U. Marks, Afterimage “Framed as a struggle with identity and racialized notions of beauty, this…

  • Base Tranquility

    This film, done in the fine tradition of hand-painted images and sound, deals with Western man’s fetish for technology.

  • Searching for My Mother’s Garden

    Partially shot in rural Czecho-Slovakia, this film investigates the phenomenon of no longer being rooted to a motherland, yet being tied to one’s origins.