About the Film

"I was inspired by the women courageous enough to get and keep jobs as camerawomen despite a time period when cinematography was considered to be a profession just for men: white men and their sons."

“Thank you for being our voice, the first to acknowledge our existence as Camera Woman.”
Michelle Crenshaw, Camera Operator (Hollywood)

Alexis Krasilovsky, Writer/Director, Women Behind the Camera

WOMEN BEHIND THE CAMERA

Who knew that only 2% of cinematographers on the largest budget American films were women?

And what will the world of film be like when the vision of women informs it in a fuller way? 

This made-by-women-for-women documentary,  based upon Krasilovsky’s book of the same name, connects globally, exploring the lives of  camerawomen in Canada, China, France, Germany, India, India, Iran, Mexico, Russia, Senegal, and other countries in a way never seen before. 

American camerawomen shown include top Directors of Photography like Ellen Kuras, ASC (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), Amy Vincent, ASC “Black Snake Moan”) and top pioneers like African-American camerawoman Jessie Maple Patton – who had to sue the union and television networks to get jobs. 

From the secret films by camerawomen of Taliban beating Afghani women, to historic footage by China’s first camerawomen of Mao’s travels through the Chinese countryside… From the playful narrative of a Russian filmmaker  who learned the art from her father, her choice of career 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.