Courtney Stephens, 2017-2021, 1 hr, Live Performance

Terra Femme is screening for $12 on October 16 at 7:30PM as part of A Mystery Inside a Fact: Experimental and Amateur Ethnography on the Indian Subcontinent.

Filmmaker Courtney Stephens appears at Maysles Cinema, in person, to present the live performance version of her essay film Terra Femme, which premiered in its prerecorded version at Doc Fortnight earlier this year.

Mining a bounty of rare travel footage shot by women, Stephens crafts a thoughtful dialectic between her own experiences of seeing the world— having set off for India after being diagnosed with a rare illness— and those of women past who were able to record their own. 

“As though aware the person that describes the world transcends their place within it,” she makes careful observation of the gendered dynamics around seeing and being seen, and of the added layer in approaching travel as a privileged outsider, extending a history of individual movement into a gesture of archival liberation. 

“[Stephens] develops far-reaching analyses of women’s filmmaking in an era when few women had professional directing careers—and ultimately connects their work to the sociology and the spirit of travel itself.”

- Richard Brody, The New Yorker