This charming musical stars a very young Ruby Dee and exuberant musicians from the all-woman jazz forties' band, The International Sweethearts of Rhythm. It was made by a small independent black company for black audiences and was one of the first films to successfully counter its era's negative stereotypes of African-Americans.

This wildly inventive film, entirely shot during a single night, turns the concept of telling a tale inside out. Its four-woman crew — Cassandra Einstein, Jill Godmilow, Andrea Loomis and Gail Porter — both create the film as filmmakers and enter the film as actors. Tales is about story telling itself, the art of the 'tall tale' and the experience of filmmaking.

One of the earliest American historical feature films, Flame of Mexico was produced and written by Juliet Barrett Rublee, a social activist and important financial sponsor of Margaret Sanger. Rublee's story is about workers against greedy landlords and was constructed to present realistic portraits of Mexicans. Shot entirely in Mexico, the film also provides a rare document of early American film production there and is an invaluable example of the work of independent women producers.

Barbara Hammer is a pioneering and prolific visual artist, who has been making films and video — often including the female and lesbian body — since the 1970s. Bent Time is an ambitious visual trek across the US, stopping at high-energy sites such as Chaco Canyon, NM and the Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridges. Inspired by the scientific speculation that time might bend in a similar way to light rays curving at the periphery of the universe, Hammer ‘s optically printed, single- frame film attempts to simulate the concept of bent time. The multifaceted and influential composer, Pauline Oliveros, scored the film.

Helen Hill’s story is a multi-level test case for film preservation. An award-winning filmmaker, animator and teacher, Hill and her family chose to return to their New Orleans neighborhood, which was devastated by Katrina. Film labs refused to handle Hill’s flood damaged home movies so she hand-cleaned the films with soap and water, halting their decay. Hill’s super-eight images are poignant evidence of unseen neighborhoods and local culture lost in the hurricane. Tragically, in 2006, Helen Hill was murdered in her home, a victim of the crime that continues to plague the area. Preservation of these sometimes personal films is a memorial to a unique city and to Hill’s work and life.

Filmmaker and syndicated cartoonist, Heather McAdams, compares her low-budget, fast-paced, found footage collage movies to a colorful crazy quilt, handmade with love. Flouting conventional film construction (and workprints), McAdams’ techniques include scratching words into emulsion, optical printing, re-dubbing and crafting surprising juxtapositions, creating personal films that are intuitive, lyrical, weird and humorous!

These three Super 8 films, all made by the late documentarian Jane Morrison, offer a compliment to her often quiet, contemplative work. Lipstick 74 documents a woman making up her face, getting dressed and going out into the world. The Fang Gang dramatizes a vampire scene set in Maine's dense woods. Dream imagines a tragic meeting between 1920 flappers and pilgrims from 1620.

In Before Need Redressed, longtime collaborators Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley revisit their 1979 experimental film, Before Need, creating a shorter version that benefits from the artists’ evolving perspectives and experience as they have aged. The re-edited film is a complexly-layered montage of sound and image investigating memory, language and death. Nelson and Wiley’s partnership emerged from the dynamic avant-garde film culture of the Bay Area of the 1960s and 1970s and they have produced a distinct body of important work both in concert and individually.

The Secret Agent was the first film using now familiar archival footage to examine the legacy of exposure to dioxin spray — better known as Agent Orange. Ochs’ documentary won a special Jury Prize at Sundance and premiered at the New York Film Festival and is particularly timely. The film is an invaluable document which reflects on past and present US wartime involvement and treatment of veterans, sustained abuse to the environment and the residual unresolved issues of the Vietnam War. The film includes scenes of young Al Gore and the music of renowned protest singer, Country Joe McDonald.