The filmmaker, fighting ovarian cancer, stage 3, returns to her experimental roots, in a multilayered film of numerous chemotherapy sessions with images of light and movement that take her far from the hospital bed. A a cancer ‘thriver’ rather than ’survivor’, Barbara Hammer rides the red hills of Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, the grassy foothlls of the Big Horn in Wyoming, and leafy paths in Woodstock, New York changing illness into recovery. The haunting and wondrous music of Meredith Monk underscores and celebrates in this film that lifts us up when we might be most discouraged.

Through intimate interviews, provocative art, and rare, historical film and video footage, this feature documentary reveals how art addressing political consequences of discrimination and violence, the Feminist Art Revolution radically transformed the art and culture of our times.

Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic.

Four stages of a lesbian relationship explored in an experimental film starring performance artists Terry Sendgraff and Barbara Hammer on suspended trapezes and ropes.

What do filmmakers as disparate as Kevin Smith, Ed Burns, Rob Epstein, and Barbara Hammer have in common? A secret weapon known as Bob Hawk. As a veteran of the American independent film scene since its inception, the cinephile and consultant has been a regular, cherished presence at film festivals and markets for over three decades. Hawk saw promise in scrappy, independently produced films like Clerks and The Brothers McMullen when no one else even knew to look, and he brought these films to the attention of the Sundance Film Festival, thereby launching multiple careers in the process. An unsung champion of new voices, he has discovered innovative work, nurtured new talents, and brokered relationships with film festivals and critics alike, while staying out of the spotlight—until now. At 75, Bob Hawk looks back on a still-vibrant life in independent film, exploring how the rebellious gay son of a preacher found his calling as a behind-the-scenes film impresario.

This video documentary centers on the questions of civil liberties and cultural differences in a society beginning to open as one woman searches for her own ethnic roots, identity and family history in Ukraine. Issues of human rights, anti-Semitism, homophobia, feminism and a divided and economically-depressed country are encountered as Barbara Hammer, a feminist activist and pioneer of lesbian cinema, return to a “homeland” full of struggling as people search for a new post-glasnost identity.

Jeju-do is the largest of Korean islands and lies between Korea and Japan. There, for hundreds of years, women dive without breathing apparatus, to the ocean floor and collect shellfish, octopus, and urchins that they sell. The divers are in their sixties and seventies and their daughters do not want to inherit their work, lifestyle, and health problems that go with diving. As a filmmaker I was privileged to meet many of these women and dive with them. Their stories of hardship and pride confirmed my desire to record this unique and ancient tradition.

Documentary that highlights 18 women and covers a period of time from the 50's to the 90's. The women chosen were selected because they represent the real diversity within both feminism and independent film and video. They range in age from 65 to 25. They are black, white, Puerto Rican, Yugoslavian, Asian American, biracial. They are straight, gay and bisexual. What they share is a need to express their own interpretations of what American culture is and could be and a belief that this work is made particularly powerful through the media.

Generations is a 30 minute 16mm film about mentoring and passing on the tradition of personal experimental filmmaking. Barbara Hammer, 70 years old, hands the camera to Gina Carducci, a young queer filmmaker. Shooting during the last days of Astroland at Coney Island, New York, the filmmakers find that the inevitable fact of aging echoes in the architecture of the amusement park and in the emulsion of the film medium itself. Inspired by Shirley Clarke’s Bridges Go Round, both filmmakers edited picture and sound separately, joining their films in the middle when they finished making a true generational and experimental experiment.

Hammer’s 2003 film Resisting Paradise, which deals with the concept of art as a tool of political resistance, was especially fascinating to me. Hammer, who was doing a painting residency in Cassis, France, when war broke out in Kosovo, found herself questioning the validity of art in the face of political conflict and unrest. She began exploring the history of the French Resistance in Cassis, and used that as a chance to reflect on how Cassis’ artistic community, both those who were threatened by the Nazi occupation of France and those who were able to remain relatively neutral, reacted to the atrocities of the Second World War.