Terra Femme (2021) live documentary-performance with Courtney Stephens

Friday, February 11, 7PM, In-Person, Free | RSVP

In this live documentary-performance hybrid, Courtney Stephens investigates the history of women as travel filmmakers from the 1920s through the 1950s. Drawing entirely on archival materials, Stephens scrutinizes the traces left by these women with a movie camera, asking questions about gender and genre: What common subjects drew their eye? What social roles did they challenge, reproduce, or inhabit? What do these films say about the place of women in the economies of cinema and colonialism? Hearkening to the illustrated lectures of travel societies and 20th-century home movie projections, Stephens uses the live performance mode to reflect on the personal stakes of her inquiry as a traveler and filmmaker. The result is a film essay as moving as it is transporting.

Following the screening, Courtney Stephens will be in conversation with Malia Haines-Stewart, Associate Film Programmer, and Madison Brown, Ph.D. Candidate, Screen Cultures.

"Terra Femme is Stephens’s magnum opus. It is also a meditation on the unresolved matter of women’s relationship to earthly places. What kind of home is earth, family, society? Where does the body go to live and to die? What does it mean to move through the world with this particular body, raced and gendered, disabled and vulnerable? And perhaps most pressing of all, who gets to describe the world?"

– Pooja Rangan, "To Describe The World: A Conversation With Courtney Stephens About ‘Terra Femme’, Another Gaze (July 2021)