The first roughie by Doris Wishman, with sexuality as a central subject, is a rape and revenge film, a subgenre of exploitation cinema. In this film, Gigi Darlene is Meg, a housewife who flees Boston for New York after killing the doorman of her building while he tried to rape her. Structured by a long dream sequence, the film follows Meg through several other encounters as she tries to escape prison.
The first of two films by Doris Wishman with burlesque performer Chesty Morgan as Crystal, a woman who uses unusual methods to exact revenge on the mobsters who killed her boyfriend. By seducing each one, she incapacitates her victims and suffocates them with her breasts. A brief clip appears in the film Serial Mom, by John Waters.
In one of the director’s first nudie cuties, the nudist colony is the right starting point to explore the possibility of showing many people naked on screen. It is the opening of this controversial colony that leads a journalist to infiltrate it, hoping to denounce the premises. Circumstances quickly change and the journalist becomes a nudist.
Nothing is more auspicious for a young couple than a pay rise. When they move into a larger apartment, however, the husband is rendered disabled and unable to work. The wife needs to get a job quickly and with the bills pilling up, an unusual proposal appears and, succumbing, she is faced with the unromantic reality of sex work.
Doris Wishman goes where no woman has gone before and transports sexploitation to the surface of the Moon in a sensual science fiction film, as if Star Trek had arrived with the wrong coordinates. When Dr. Jeff Huntley receives an inheritance he begins to build a rocket ship with the help of his mentor Dr. Nichols, in order to travel to the Earth’s satellite. In a Florida-turned-Moon, they encounter a sensual (and telepathic) alien community.
Doris Wishman is back with Chesty Morgan. In this movie, Chesty is Jane, a secret agent with a particular method: hiding a mini-camera in her cleavage. But the tech is revealed to be a ticking time bomb, set to go off if Jane fails to complete the mission.
A sexploitation film with a hint of the supernatural. Zeb has an unhealthy attachment to Ann, and when he discovers artefacts with voodoo powers that allow him to control the object of his obsession, the young girl cannot escape this maddening, abusive game.
Leaving the model of roughies and nudie cuties, Doris Wishman directs a documentary (with situational dramatisations) that focuses on the lives of transgender people, speaking to folks like Deborah Hartin, transgender rights activist, and Dr. Leo Wollman, who assisted the transition of several people and wrote the first care protocols in these cases, among others.
In true Charlie’s Angels style, the immoral three are half-sisters (separated at birth because they were given up for adoption) whose mission is to avenge their mother’s death — and, consequently, obtain the inheritance that she left them. The mother in question is Jane from Double Agent 73, although she is no longer played by Chesty Morgan.
A film that presents itself as a comic attempt to satirise the adult film industry, which features Sammy Petrillo, a comedian and Jerry Lewis impersonator from the 50s, then in decline.
We are in 1961, at the beginning of the war for Angolan independence. Domingos Xavier is a revolutionary arrested by the Portuguese military and taken to a prison in Sambizanga. His wife, Maria, seeks him out, fearing he may have been subjected to torture, or even death. A film that shows the liberation of Angola through the eyes of a woman.
With a jazz soundtrack from the Art Ensemble of Chicago, this film denounces the crimes committed by the Portuguese in Angola. Here, we see the torture of a prisoner that results from the colonizar’s ignorance. A song whose meaning is “White Death”, Monangambée is a rallying cry against the colonial abuses in Angola.
Aimé Césaire was a surrealist, essayist, activist and one of the founders of the négritude movement, a progressive artistic and political current that defended black culture, strongly tied to marxist and anti-colonial ideals.
A documentary short that focuses on how the inhabitants of Guinea-Bissau view their black identity and culture, with the annual Carnival celebration as a backdrop.
Ilha do Fogo, in Cape Verde, is the setting for this documentary from the 70s produced by the revolutionary government of the new country, and in which the director chose an anthropological approach. The film looks beautifully at a country in the beginning of its independence.
A film that uses comedy as a way to combat racist stereotypes and outdated nationalist ideas, such as the concept of culinary prowess, through a look at the daily lives of African migrants in Paris.
A story of political imprisonment set in a mental hospital where the Stalin state police placed whoever their opponents were. The narrative is true to the original text, a short story by the Russian writer Victor Serge. In this film, Maldoror directs Roger Blin, Rüdiger Vogler and Anne Wiazemsky. The jazz soundtrack is by Jean-Yves Bosseur and Jean-Louis Chautemps.
A telefilm that faithfully adapts Akli Tadjer’s novel, Les A.N.I du Tassili — “unidentified Algerians”, indicates, the acronym. Like the book, the film follows an Algerian who grew up in France, but will visit the birthplace. He eventually returns, along with the ANI returning from their vacations to go back to the Parisian banlieues, happy to be there.