March isn't just the month Spring starts or the month Robots debuted in theaters. It's also Women's History Month, an occasion that's been celebrated annually since 1987. This is a month when one can take a moment to look around and realize all the glorious things accomplished by women of all shapes and sizes in societies all over the world. In this modern world, where trans women and women of color are under constant legislative attack, the modern version of this month should also be an opportunity to reflect on the reality that there's no one way to be a "proper" woman. Heck, the entire concept of there being a single idealized "proper" vision of womanhood is a toxic idea perpetuated by bullies.
Want a great demonstration of the sheer variety of women that can be celebrated during Women's History Month? Just look at these eight documentaries that concern the experiences of trailblazing women. When one talks about “trailblazing women" in this context, we’re not just talking about “girlbosses” or exclusively the kind of ladies that are in all conventional history textbooks. These eight superb documentaries reflect that “trailblazing” women can take many forms. Maybe these gals were trailblazing because they were pioneers in a specific field. Others were political activists, and still others are impressive trailblazers for continuously existing in a society that actively seeks to erase them. Women can take endless forms. So too can women who qualify as “trailblazers.” Just ask these eight classics of documentary cinema.
All The Beauty and the Bloodshed
Nan Goldin is a photographer. She's also a queer woman who experienced the loss of so many to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Oh, and Goldin is also a leading modern-day protestor against the companies that created the opioid epidemic. There's so much going on in the life of Goldin, which makes it incredibly impressive that the 2022 documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed covers so much of her life without stumbling into the territory of "overstuffed."
Director Laura Poitras masterfully juggles the various nooks and crannies of Goldin's life often by opting for an incredibly streamlined form. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed often focuses on the past by filling the frame with vintage Polaroid photographs while Goldin's voice-over narration provides testimony to events ranging from her tumultuous childhood to her time as a photographer in New York City. Goldin’s photos are so rich with lived-in experiences that it’s immediately apparent why she’s iconic as a photographer. Fixating so much of this documentary on her life’s work is already an inspired flourish. Combining those images with Golden’s stories told via narration makes things even more moving. This woman’s yarns (especially vintage anecdotes about joyful times with the queer community in the 1970s) are utterly transfixing. The life of Nan Goldin is endlessly compelling and it’s glorious that she got tied into a cinematic ode as beautifully realized as All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.
Faces Places
Faces Places wasn’t just the pinnacle of documentary cinema released in 2017. It was also the penultimate directorial effort of Agnes Varda, one of the greatest filmmakers to ever grace the medium of cinema. The presence of this icon (one of the most revered filmmakers of any gender in the history of movies) would be enough to warrant the presence of Faces Places on this list.
What’s extra moving about this documentary, though, is that Varda’s camera chronicles real-life ordinary people, many of them women. “Trailblazing” doesn’t just mean being prolific enough to get a holiday named after you. It can also mean just existing and surviving in a world that’s so relentlessly cruel. Faces Places, much like earlier Varda documentaries like The Gleaners and I, lets the everyday trailblazers have their moment on the silver screen.
Read our review of Faces Places
Kokomo City
One of the great under-discussed movies of 2023, Kokomo City is a documentary from filmmaker D. Smith that focuses on a bevy of Black trans sex workers located across America. Smith’s camera concentrates on these ladies and their deeply transfixing anecdotes, which range from humorous stories about peculiar customers to vulnerable testimonies about their gender identity. No two women in Kokomo City are exactly alike, a subtle detail that reflects the endless variety of personalities in the trans community. These women and D. Smith herself perfectly encapsulate the ideal version of “trailblazing” women: working-class individuals who endure in the face of capitalism and societally conditioned bigotry.
Better yet, D. Smith’s filmmaking doesn’t just linger on the “turmoil” of women like Daniella Carter or Liyah Mitchell. Instead, she follows them through daily existence doing everything from shopping to walking down the street. It’s a naturalistic depiction of trans woman's existence, a welcome departure from the sensationalized way conventional cinema handles trans women. Women normally erased from society and cinema are center stage in Kokomo City. Their captivating stories (not to mention the incredible quality of Kokomo City overall) will make one wish this feature was the norm for American cinema rather than a rebuke to its norms.
News From Home
The placement of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman at the top of the 2022 edition of the Sight & Sound Best Movies list further solidified her as one of the all-time greatest filmmakers. In her filmography, few movies get inside the mind of this trailblazing director as deeply as News From Home. Akerman structures this documentary in an utterly idiosyncratic manner. Voice-over narration reads aloud letters from her mother (residing in Akerman’s home country of Belgium) set against extended single-take shots of everyday activity in New York City, the land Akerman now calls home.
The tug and pull between one’s homeland and a new modern domain is vividly realized on-screen within News from Home. That’s a dynamic anyone can relate to and it’s a phenomenon that plagues even directors whose slow-burn works forever changed cinema. The one-of-a-kind form of News from Home gives viewers a chance to vividly understand this psychological battle between the past and present. In the process, News from Home insightfully renders the mind of an iconic cinematic figure.
a place of RAGE Amaray
A Place of Rage
A Place of Rage is a very stripped-down production. A 1991 documentary helmed by Pratibha Parmar, the feature interviews Angela Davis, June Jordan, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Alice Walker, with the documentary exploring their views on key issues like racism or anti-queer activists. Do you really need a grand scope, though, when you've got figures like Davis or Walker talking to the camera? A Place of Rage knows that you won't get anything more compelling than just hearing these trailblazing ladies wax poetic on important issues.
Tragically, the words of these interview subjects about the importance of intersectionality remain as urgently relevant as ever more than 30 years after A Place of Rage first premiered. Eternally relevant phrases consistently unfurl from the mouths of these endlessly fascinating women, who are nonchalantly depicted with such wonderful casualness by Parmar’s camera. Figures like Davis have been so heavily demonized in American media, transformed into boogeymen meant to frighten privileged viewers. In A Place of Rage, women who’ve made history are shown just lounging in hammocks or standing casually on their balconies. They’re just human beings in this film, which is a deeply moving sight to behold.
One Child Nation
How do you come back from having your worldview defined by propaganda? It's a struggle many all over the world (including Americans struggle with on a daily basis. The 2019 documentary One Child Nation provides a fascinating depiction of this struggle, as the camera follows Nanfu Wang (who also directs the piece with Jialing Zhang) returning to her homeland of China. The purpose of this trip is to interrogate China's One-Child Policy, a government mandate Wang supported without question in her earlier years. Now, as a mother, she has more complicated feelings about this policy. One Child Nation is deeply vulnerable cinema, with Wang opening herself up to the audience to provide a warning to viewers about trusting propaganda blindly. Wang certainly qualifies as a “trailblazing” woman for this level of emotional openness, which suggests how we can all grow as people as well as be more vigilant about the countries we inhabit.
Dressed in Blue
While many bigoted politicians today act like trans people have only emerged in the last few years, trans folks and people who exist beyond the gender binary have existed forever. Just look at the 1983 documentary Dressed in Blue, which follows the lives of a series of trans women in Madrid, Spain. The individual storylines of this feature are incredibly interesting to watch, but what really makes this film stand out are recurring sequences where the central subjects are just sitting around a table, laughing together. This great motif in Dressed in Blue crystallizes the sheer variety of personalities in the trans community. It also allows trans women's lives to be defined on-screen by the sound of snorting laughter, not death and anguish.
Stories We Tell
Sarah Polley’s works as a filmmaker have been tremendously effective. Her major foray into feature-length documentary filmmaking, Stories We Tell, offers viewers a chance to explore the personal life of this influential cinematic figure. Specifically, Stories We Tell explores Polley’s revelation that the father she grew up with is not her actual birth father. This reveal flips all of Polley’s expectations of reality on their head and forces her to confront a father she never even knew existed. Stories We Tell boldly probes the psyche of an Oscar-winning artist while breaking down the way stories, home video footage, and other mementos of the past can always take on new layers of context.