Sunday, December 7, 2025 at 7:30 PM to 10:00 PM
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Los Angeles Filmforum presents *Filmforum at 50, program 3: The Women’s Gaze: Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction and Courtney Stephens’s Terra Femme.* *Soft Fiction* will be projected in 16mm, and *Terra Femme* presented as a live performance. ∆ This program features a pair of films from two eras (or three, really) of Los Angeles filmmaking. Chick Strand (1931-2009) was one of the founders of Canyon Cinema, who relocated to Los Angeles in the late 1960s and became one of the critical filmmakers and teachers of film in the region from then until her death. Opinionated, unruly, insightful, visionary, *Soft Fiction* is one of her masterworks, an extended semi-personal documentary incorporating several stories by women of sensual experiences they had had. Comprised of rare amateur travelogues shot by women between the 1920s-50s, *Terra Femme* is a live documentary by Courtney Stephens that weaves together questions of female authorship, cinematic excavation, and the Western gaze, complicating the freedoms these women experienced while traveling through foreign landscapes. Both films pursue an alternative notion of what has been called ethnographic film, rooted in the experiences of women, released from standard expectations of behavior, removing false notions of objectivity in their personal expressions of worldly experience. The films speak to one another across eras: women traveling the world in the first half of the twentieth century, through a feminist documentary lens of the late 1970s, to the insightful reflections of today. Please join us for this special evening, with *Soft Fiction* on 16mm and the now-uncommon live performance version of Stephens’s *Terra Femme*. Full program notes at: https://www.lafilmforum.org/schedule/