Audacious Women: Janet Hews; Ballad Of the Causeway

Audacious Women, a half-hour Seattle cable access series from Indian filmmaker Amy Laly, is a low-budget, non-contextualized (as in: some of this won't mean diddly to folks in Peoria) monologue. We watched the piece on Janet Hews, a Scottish immigrant who--without preamble--talks about her U.K. experiences during WWII, her emigration to Yakima (which many may not realize is a city in Washington state), her unhappy marriage, and her work at the University of Washington (amongst a "little cadre of spoiled males"). a community activist, Hews' work is only lightly touched on--the lion's share of her conversation is given over to complaints about men ("a rather wretched lot" whom she "despises"), power imbalances ("I'm a great `unfair' shouter"), and hopes that she is "not an intellectual snob" (which, to some degree, she is). Nevertheless, Hews is a quite entertaining and thought-provoking commentator; but there's a lack of focus to her comments (which is more the editor's problem than hers) and the video ends abruptly, as if a time limit had been met.Laly also directed an interesting piece, again low-budget, on the diversity of life on a busy street in her native Bombay, India. Combining voice-over narration (which is a little more flowery than the washed-out looking video can comfortably bear) with interview clips (some with notable background noise), Ballad of the Causeway nevertheless captures an insider's view of a variegated society ("upper crust, lower crust, and no crust") on a crowded street where urchins, beggars, and hucksters work the tourist trade. Laly captures some nice moments: "men piss and pray," she wryly comments on the business at the outdoor urinals painted with pictures of deities; and some of the interviewees are funny (one woman sums up the causeway as "a wonderful place, where you can always get pinched.") But, for most, this is a little too rough, production-wise.Both titles have their individual charms and are therefore optional purchases. (R. Pitman)