Arcadia Public Library

In a special two-part series, acclaimed filmmaker David Sutherland (The Farmer's Wife, Country Boys) creates an unforgettable portrait of Robin Charboneau, a 32-year-old divorced single mother and Oglala Sioux woman living on North Dakota's Spirit Lake Reservation.. Sutherland follows Robin over three years as she struggles to raise her two children, further her education, and heal herself from the wounds of sexual abuse she suffered as a child. Kind...

An example of Reiniger’s animated music films based on opera, PAPAGENO is filled with impeccable attention to detail. Papageno, a birdcatcher from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” idles his time with his bird companions, fights an undulating snake, and finds love and familial happiness through delicate and delightful visuals that parallel the rhythm and expressivity of the music.

Elizabeth Streb and the STREB Extreme Action Company form a motley troupe of flyers and crashers. Propelled by Streb's edict that anything too safe is not action, these daredevils challenge the assumptions of art, aging, injury, gender, and human possibility. Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity traces the evolution of Elizabeth Streb's movement philosophy as she pushes herself and her performers from the ground to the sky. Revealing the passions...

SPOOK SPORT announces itself as a new kind of film ballet comprised of “color, music, and movement,” and is a lively interpretation of a night at a graveyard where colored shapes representing bats, ghosts, and spooks jump, shimmy, bounce, glide, and spiral across the frame. Bute hired animator Norman McLaren to draw these forms directly onto the filmstrip. Filmed in two-color Cinecolor.

SERVICE highlights the resourcefulness of seven amazing women who represent the first wave of mothers, daughters and sisters returning home from the frontless wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. Portraying the courage of women veterans as they transition from active duty to their civilian lives, this powerful film describes the horrific traumas they have faced, the inadequate care they often receive on return, and the large and small accomplishments they...

Based on a fable by Ernst Keienburg, this short drama exhibits an entrancing sense of space. As a story about a monstrous man who steals a town’s musical instruments, scholars argue that this is an anti-Nazi allegory. When the musical instruments come to life, Reiniger’s playful silhouette animation celebrates the power of music as joy overcomes evil.

Paul Wears Dresses follows the struggles of Stefonknee Wolscht, a transgender woman trying to rebuild her life. Losing her home and her family, Stefonknee gives a firsthand account of the many challenges transgender people face. Stefenknee Wolscht was the quintessential working man. He was a married father of 7, an upstanding member of the Catholic Church and a successful car mechanic. In his 40’s Stefonknee risked everything to transition from...

A video essay exploring the frequency and meaning of Vanity Tables in a wide variety of Sirk movies. Is it a device that traps and keeps women in an artificial world with a limited point of view? Or is it a gateway to the past, and the future, and a distorted but nevertheless real vision of the roles that woman are forced to play in society?

This is quite a story. For there are some stories that are so individually significant that they speak for an entire area of history. Imagine trying to become the first woman doctor, or being a slave woman who helped lead over three hundred others to freedom, or daring simply to write of an equality and a freedom that seemed so natural and yet was left out of the Declaration of Independence. Within the individual stories of the progress and accomplishments...

The Babushkas of Chernobyl journeys into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone several decades after the world’s worst nuclear disaster in April 1986. The tightly regulated 1000 square mile Dead Zone remains one of the most radioactively contaminated places on Earth, complete with military border guards.. Surprisingly, a defiant, spirited group of elderly women scratches out an existence in this lethal landscape. The resilient babushkas are the last survivors...