Film Categories: Work about Women

  • Bad Brownies

    A mockumentary of memoires of childhood transgression. Former Brownies recall their lives in the organization, and two modern-day recruits – one a good Brownie and one a bad one – demonstrate different reactions to the rules and rituals of the Brownie circle.

  • Ranky Tanky

    An animated film using cut-outs and a children’s song.

  • Rat Life and Diet in North America

    “I can tell you that Wieland’s film holds. It may be about the best (or richest) political movie around. It’s all about rebels (enacted by real rats) and police (enacted by real cats). After long suffering under the cats, the rats break out of prison and escape to Canada. There they take up organic gardening, with no DDT in the grass. It is a parable, a satire, an adventure movie, or you can call it pop art or any art you want – I find it one of the most original films made recently.” – Jonas Mekas “The film is…

  • 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).

  • Ball in California, A

    I took along a beach ball on my trip to California; it is bounced, rolled, tossed, kicked and carried by a motley collection of complete strangers who express a great range of attitudes towards the camera, the ball and me. This film incorporates an unusual improvised soundtrack for solo bassoon.

  • Reading Between the Lines

    Reading the replies to a personal ad she has placed, a woman imagines herself in relationships with three different men. The film uses both layering and fragmentation to weave a web of associations and create a dynamic and fast-moving flow of images and events. Quick flashbacks, like momentary thoughts, accumulate. The reading voice is the constant, a soft steady interior voice around which the images dance and leap. The most dramatic moments of a given scenario are played out in a realistic fashion, and some scenarios, differently imagined, are repeated with each of the men: the restaurant, the dance, the…

  • Reality Check

    Using cutout pictures from magazines, animated to a harmonica soundtrack, the audience is asked to look around and figure out what is important to us. Perhaps it is not “the automobile and some of the other consumer products that we seem to dote on” (Grand Rapids Press).

  • Reason Over Passion

    “Joyce Wieland’s films are among the most endearing I have ever seen, making her point and sealing the issue in a womanly way without any concern for ragged edges. ‘La Raison Avant la Passion’ is a whirlwind view of Canada with an anti-dialectical premise.” – Douglas Pringle, ArtsCanada “REASON OVER PASSION… is Joyce Wieland’s major film so far. With its many eccentricities, it is a glyph of her artistic personality; a lyric vision tempered by an aggressive form and a visionary patriotism mixed with ironic self parody. It is a film to be seen many times.” – P. Adams Sitney,…

  • Reasonably Barbie

    “Reasonably Barbie” was developed out of frustration with the North American “Beauty Guidelines,” outlined by mass media and advertising. Divided into two parts, the film allows many women (and men too) to take an objective look at the North American “Beauty Myth” starting with a splash of humour and then moving to a more serious approach. The filmmaker hopes that the film will encourage young women to stop hurting themselves for fashion and inspire them to come to realize their own self worth.

  • 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