Liane Brandon’s, Betty Tells Her Story
To Women’s Film Preservation Fund Friends and Supporters:
We hope you are all staying healthy and productive, despite the hardships Covid-19 has caused in our lives.
The WFPF began 2020 with the premiere at MoMA’s To Save and Project festival of our most recent preservation, Jan Oxenberg’s, Home Movie, a landmark lesbian film that utilizes Oxenberg’s family’s home movie footage with her own recollections on identity and being. We assumed this was the send-off of another exhilarating year with WFPF preservations landing on screens in New York and out-of-town. In fact, our programming committee was deep into planning a series on WFPF preserved home movies and amateur films and in exploring out-of-town venues for additional screenings of our two important 2018 series: From the Vault: Women’s Advocacy on Film and Artists and Activists: Second Wave Feminist Film Makers. Then Covid-19 put a stop to all of this.
The film community has met this challenge, offering a superb variety of films streaming online including some of our preservations! Some highlights include WFPF preserved essential feminist films from the 1970’s: Liane Brandon’s Betty Tells Her Story; Julia Reichert and Kim Klein’s Growing Up Female: Newsreel Collective’s Janie’s Janie; and Christine Choy and Cynthia Maurizio’s Inside Women Inside are all screening in the Criterion Channel’s new series, “Tell Me.” Also on the Criterion Chanel are two early films by Bette Gordon: I-95 and Michigan Avenue. The WFPF is also looking into streaming programs from our preservations of our own making.
As we continue to keep up with state-of-the art image resolution and improved sound, making sure archival requirements that insure longevity are met in all of our preservations, the costs continue to rise. We expect more applicants and higher budgets when we are able to open our pandemic delayed 2020 grant submissions.
As the inequities in the film industry are being brought into sharp focus, women’s film preservation is key to revealing how the power and creativity of female filmic voices have been important influences in shaping cinema history. To continue to fund preservations, the WFPF needs to turn to you for support. We know much of our community has been hard hit because of sheltering in place, but we ask that those of you who are able to, give as much as you can. No contribution is ever too small!
To make an online contribution, please visit: https://www.nywift.org/donate/donate-to-the-wfpf/
Check contributions should be written to “New York Women in Film & Television” with “for the WFPF” on the memo line and mailed to:
New York Women in Film & Television
WFPF
6 East 39th Street, Suite 1200
New York, NY 10016
With thanks,
Kirsten Larvick and Ann Deborah Levy, Co-Chairs, Women’s Film Preservation Fund
Cynthia Lopez, Executive Director, New York Women in Film & Television
