Sisters in the Struggle | A Place of Rage

Sisters in the Struggle

D: Dionne Brand and Ginny Stikeman, Canada 1991, 49 min, English OV

Sisters in the Struggle was produced at the National Film Board of Canada’s Studio D, founded in 1974 as the world’s first state-funded feminist film workshop. Ginny Stikeman was Studio D’s executive producer from 1990 until its closure in 1996, a time during which the studio sought to confront criticism that it suffered from structural racism and had advanced a homogeneous, white feminism. Sisters in the Struggle, poet Dionne Brand’s second film for the unit, explores the life experiences and political activism of Black women in Canada, with special attention to questions of migration, class, and the intersection of multiple oppressions.

A Place of Rage

D: Pratibha Parmar, United Kingdom 1991, 52 min, English OV

A Place of Rage examines the role of Black women in the US Civil Rights movement through interviews with Angela Davis, June Jordan, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Alice Walker. The film underlines the need for intergenerational transmission of histories of struggle and posits cultural production as integral to the project of emancipation. Funded by the UK’s Channel 4, it attracted over one million viewers when first broadcast. As Pratibha Parmar observes, “Television perpetuates the white male expert as the voice of authority, and as the voice of ‘god,’ and I believe that films like A Place of Rage begin to dismantle this authority and hegemony of the white male voice. … There is no doubt that there is a need, and a hunger, in people, to see and hear women like these talking about their lives, their struggles, and their history. What’s happening now is very much related to what happened then, and that history is not just confined to that time frame.”