Education Professor Emerita Liane Brandon’s Films Featured at UK Film Festival

Liane Brandon

Films directed and produced by Liane Brandon, professor emerita of education, were featured recently at the Cinema Rediscovered film festival in the United Kingdom. The event, considered the U.K.'s leading festival dedicated to classic cinema, teamed up with the Women's Film Preservation Fund to present three of Brandon's groundbreaking short films from the early 1970s in Bristol, England on July 26.<_o3a_p>

"Sometimes I Wonder Who I Am," released in 1970, presents a poignant brief portrait of a young mother. The film grew out of the experiences of a group of women who found - as they haltingly expressed to one another their feelings of emptiness, anger and fear - that they were not alone.<_o3a_p>

"Anything You Want To Be," from 1971, chronicles a teenager's humorous collision with gender role stereotypes. It is one of the first independent films of the early women's movement to explore the external, and the more subtle internal, pressures that a girl faces in finding her identity.<_o3a_p>

"Betty Tells Her Story," the longest of the three films, is a poignant tale of beauty, identity and a dress from 1972. Betty tells her story twice in two separate takes, with a haunting contrast between the two versions. This was the first independent film of the women's movement to explore the issues of body image, self-worth and beauty in American culture.<_o3a_p>

"I'm amazed that my films are still relevant after more than 50 years - but this also means that we have much more work to do for women's issues and equality," says Brandon, who taught in what was then the School of Education at UMass Amherst from 1973 until her retirement in 2004.<_o3a_p>

Brandon emerged in the late 1960s as one of America's first independent female filmmakers. Her keen eye and focus on women's political issues set her work apart and her films were distributed widely in an industry dominated by men. She would go on to co-found New Day Films in 1971, the first filmmaker-run cooperative dedicated to the distribution of films on feminist and social issues. Her films are distributed by New Day Films and are archived in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, and she has since built a career as a celebrated still photographer.<_o3a_p>

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