Screening: Body Parts

Join us and the VCU Department of Photography and Film for a special screening of “Body Parts“, which premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival, followed by a conversation with director Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and professor Sasha Waters.

Innovative and incisive, “Body Parts” explores the evolution of desire and “sex” on-screen from a woman’s perspective. Demystifying the often invisible processes in creating intimacy for film and television, the documentary sheds light on the most closely-guarded secrets of an industry now at a crossroads.

“Body Parts” features candid interviews with actors and creators who are advocating for real change, including Jane Fonda, Joey Soloway, Angela Robinson, Karyn Kusama, Rose McGowan, Rosanna Arquette, Alexandra Billings, Stacy Rukeyser, Emily Meade, David Simon, and Tanya Saracho. Deftly illustrated with movie clips stretching back to Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies, “Body Parts” is part film-history lesson on the dominance of the heterosexual male gaze and part clarion call for employing intimacy coordinators across the entertainment field. It neither shies away from uncomfortable conversations nor ignores imagemakers trying to set a higher, more inclusive bar on set and on screen.

About the Speakers:

Sasha Waters is a moving image artist who has produced and directed 18 films, 14 of which originate in 16mm. Her most recent feature documentary, Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable, was called one of the year’s best by The New Yorker and won a Special Jury Prize at the SXSW Film Festival. Her past documentary, experimental and essay films have screened at the Telluride Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kassel Dokfest, the National Gallery, the Tribeca, Ann Arbor, Woodstock, Chicago Underground, Big Sky Documentary Film Festivals and the Museum of the Moving Image among other international venues. Sasha is a three-time recipient of Media Arts grants from the National Endowment of the Arts; her films have been supported by Field of Vision, the Catapult Film Fund and the Jerome Foundation, and she has completed residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Kristy Guevara-Flanagan is an Associate Professor at UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film, and Television where she heads the MFA Directing Documentary concentration. Her most recent short film ÁGUILAS (co-directed with Maite Zubiaurre; SXSW, PBS, The New Yorker), about a group of volunteers who help recover bodies of missing migrants crossing the border, was short-listed for the 2022 Academy Awards. Kristy has been making award-winning documentary films that focus on gender and representation for over two decades. Her debut feature, Going on 13 (co-directed with Dawn Valadez, 2009), covering four years in the lives of four adolescent girls premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast on PBS. Her follow-up feature, Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines (2013), traces the evolution of the comic book hero Wonder Woman as a way to reflect onsociety’s anxieties about women’s liberation. Starring Lynda Carter, Lindsay Wagner, and real-life superheroines such as Gloria Steinam and Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre), the film garnered numerous awards, premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival and was broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens in 2013. Her short, What Happened to Her (2016) explores our cultural obsession with images of the dead woman on screen and premiered at Hot Docs, where it received an honorable mention for best short. Kristy’s work has been funded by ITVS, the Sundance Institute, Fork Films, the International Documentary Association, Latino Public Broadcasting, and California Humanities. Many of her films are currently ineducational distribution with Women Make Movies.