The Fall '06 Archives: Episode Four aired on Wednesday October 4th 2006

The Fairy Tale of Everyday Life
Intertwining embedded messages from fairy tales to popular culture with the reality of daily life, this fairy tale depicts the life of many women, including marriage, birth, death and the continuation of the myth. Based on personal experience this video addresses the idea of how we internalize embedded cultural messages and also attempts to question and draw attention to the value of what has been commonly recognized as women's work and the domestic sphere.















Good Mommy
Confronting the ambivalent feelings women often experience in regard to their children, and in particular, the constant demands of an infant, this video describes the conflicting desires, guilt, burdens, fears and longing involved in giving birth and raising children. The origin of this work came about from my own dreams about motherhood and the related stories of other women's description of similar dreams.

Filmmaker Bio:
Kristi Ryba is a video artist and a painter/printmaker living and working on Johns Island near Charleston South Carolina. She has shown her video animations both locally and in New York, Atlanta, Boise ID and Cranbrook, MI. Since 2002 she has been making stop frame video animations using dolls, (the embodiment of all that is female) to serve as standardized human forms through which she examines cultural roles, relationships and common experiences such as growth, transition and change. Her next project is about the life of three sisters growing up with a mentally handicapped brother, through which she will explore the fears and prejudices associated with being different and the effect of mental impairment within a family.

kristiryba.com















Her Heart is Washed in Water & then Weighed
Ripe red tomatoes. A clinical examination of brain tissue. Pudgy baby feet swinging high above the ground. What do these images have in common? They can all be seen in Her Heart is Washed in Water & then Weighed, an irreducibly complex meditation on monuments, mortality, and female mobility that takes its title from a procedure in the autopsying of a human corpse. Filmed in Super 8 and 16mm in Rome, Italy and Iowa City, Iowa, Her Heart is Washed in Water & then Weighed also features the Coliseum, my back yard and my mother’s story about roast chicken, but when you die everything you know – including this - disappears.

Filmmaker Bio:
Sasha Waters is an award-winning documentary & experimental filmmaker, and associate professor at the University of Iowa. Her diverse range of films & videos all address, in one manner or another, the experiences of culturally marginalized populations and the subversion of social, sexual and political hierarchies of power. Waters’ work has broadcast and screened widely in the U.S. and abroad, including on the PBS series Independent Lens, the Sundance Channel, the Ann Arbor Film Festival & Tour (twice) and the Videoex International Festival of Experimental Film in Zurich. She has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Iowa Arts Council, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo.













The Abortion Diaries
A documentary featuring 12 women who speak candidly about their abortions (and other stuff). Their stories weave together with the filmmaker's diary entries to present a compelling, moving and at times surprisingly funny "dinner party" where the audience is invited to hear what women say behind closed doors about motherhood, medical technology, sex, spirituality, love, work and their own bodies.

www.theabortiondiaries.com

Filmmaker Bio:
Penny Lane is an independent filmmaker living in western Massachusetts. Her collaborative and solo experimental, narrative and documentary video work has screened at AFI FEST, Int'l Film Festival Rottersam, San Francisco Int'l Film Festival, Seattle Int'l Film Festival, Women in the Director's Chair, Santa Fe Art Institute, MOMA, and DUMBO Art Under the Bridge. She earned her MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute and her BA in American Culture at Vassar College. From 2003-5 she was a core producer of the Hudson-Mohawk Independent Media Center, a group dedicated to making journalistic work that challenges the assumptions of the mainstream media. She has also worked extensively with youth at media centers such as Children's Media Project and The Ark, Inc. Currently she is a visiting assistant professor of video at Hampshire College.