My body is a very precious place. It's concentrated ground.

Weekly Directed By Women Viewing Guide

Let’s make it a Little Edie Summer!

This week I am recommending Lizzie Borden’s dystopian masterpiece, the earliest extant feature film directed by an Iranian woman, Tilda Swinton’s co-directorial debut, a cult documentary perfect for summertime malaise, a month-long screening series at the Woodward cinema in Cincinnati, NewFest’s Pride 2025 lineup, one of my favorite films from last year now on streaming, and a documentary about a trailblazing Palestinian feminist and activist.

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Lizzie Borden’s groundbreaking dystopian drama Born In Flames is a intersectional feminist manifesto

The last currently scheduled screening in association with the release of my book Cinema Her Way will be a 35mm screening of Lizzie Borden’s groundbreaking dystopian drama Born In Flames at the Cleveland Cinematheque. I’m bummed to be missing the screening due to the situation with my Dad, but grateful that they will still be screening this film, which sadly seems to be even more relevant now than when it was made more than forty years ago. Here is an excerpt from my discussion with Borden:

With my second film, Born in Flames, I wanted to explore power structures—capitalism, democratic socialism, labor.

Born In Flames was a reaction against my first film, Regrouping, which I made when I was in the art world, about a white women’s group—which I showed a few times, then put away for decades, and which has since been restored by the Anthology Film Archives. With Born in Flames, I wanted to work with women in a different way—with women of color, working-class women. Working Girls was also political, but about sex work as work.

I’m so associated with those three films; people think I’ve stopped making films, but I’ve been trying to set up projects for years. One is about an abortionist, set in 1953 against the background of McCarthyism. It is really about when one freedom goes, they all go. It almost happened a few times, but cataclysmic events—9/11, the pandemic, the strikes—caused delays. I have other projects as well, all about women on the edge—about difficult, interesting women.

The film screens on Thursday, June 5th at 6:30pm. You can get tickets here. You can also screen the film on Criterion Channel.