The Smith Film Studies Program brought together some of the most eminent female documentary filmmakers “whose aim is social justice” for a series of panel discussions last weekend on the use of documentary as a medium for communicating human rights issues.

Five College Assistant Professor of Film Studies and co-organizer of “Symposium: Women, Social Justice, Documentary” Bernadine Mellis ’96 explained that the purpose of this event was to give attendees an opportunity “to hear from women practitioners of documentary who use the form as a tool for organizing, for changing the way people think, for introducing audiences to new points of view, for telling stories the mainstream media ignores or oversimplifies.”

“I think many of us can remember at least one film that stayed with us long after we viewed it, a film that may have inspired us to see our world differently, or perhaps to want our world to be different,” Mellis said. “How can a film move us beyond that moment of inspiration or longing?  Where do art-making and activism converge?  These are some of the questions our panelists and speakers [addressed last weekend].”

For students who saw the controversial documentary Invisible Children after the film went viral, these panels gave some insight into how documentaries are created, why the stories they tell are significant and the impact they have.

Panelists featured award-winning filmmakers such as Joan Braderman, known for the “stand up theory,” Oscar-winning film maker Cynthia Wade ’89, Fulbright Scholar Michelle Medina ’05 and independent film distributors like Women Make Movies Executive Director Debra Zimmerman.  

 “It was really interesting to see what gets people involved in documentary,” said Ashlynn August ’15. “You see the effect that films like Invisible Children and The Cove have, but you don’t really know what goes into them. What inspired the filmmakers to do this? How do they find these stories? I only got to go to a few of the panels, but the ones I did attend were really cool.”

The symposium also featured a keynote address by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Lourdes Portillo.

When she was 21, Portillo helped a friend in Hollywood film a documentary.

“I knew from that moment what I was going to do for the rest of my life,” she said. “That never changed. It was just a matter of when I was going to do it.”

Professor Mellis described Portillo as an “amazing” filmmaker. Her two most well-known films are Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and Senorita Extraviada.

“Both Stoddard and Weinstein were robustly populated,”  said  co-organizer of the symposium and Director of the Smith Film Studies Program Professor Alexandra Keller.

“My favorite thing was how many people were in Weinstein at 9 a.m. on Sunday,” she added.”Who knew, as [moderator] Jen Malkowski put it, that there were that many people who cared enough about documentary and pedagogy to put pants on [on] a Sunday morning.”  

Keller said it was likely that Film Studies would do an event this ambitious again at some point, though not in the immediate future.

“This took me and Bernadine Mellis two years to bring about, and the logistics are daunting. So, no, this is definitely not happening next year,” she said. “It was a wonderful weekend; a real success and so many students, and participants, have told me how inspiring it was that we would probably do something like it again in the future. But we’re certainly going to take some time off first!”