Women Behind the Camera

This global documentary, based on Alexis Krasilovsky's book of the same name, explores the lives of camerawomen in Hollywood and Bollywood, Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Senegal, the U.S. and other countries in a way never seen before. American camerawomen include top directors of photography Ellen Kuras, ASC ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), Sandi Sissel, ASC ("Salaam Bombay!") and pioneers like African-American camerawoman Jessie Maple Patton—who had to sue the union and television networks to get a job. For the past six years, the filmmakers have followed the lives of over fifty camerawomen, from video journalists risking their lives in war zones, to feature DP's, shooting buddies-with-guns escaping in slow motion from total destruction on commercial sets. From secret films by camerawomen of the Taliban beating Afghani women, to historic footage by China's first camerawomen of Mao's travels through the Chinese countryside. From the narrative of a Russian filmmaker who filmed the fall of the Soviet Union, whose choice of career is told as a love story, to rural India, where subsistence-level women are taught camerawork as a means of empowerment, to the glowing young Senegalese camerawoman willing to climb onto a man's shoulders— literally—to get her subject, Professor Krasilovsky shows us a world of beauty, courage and technical skill. (Ostrava Kamera Oko)