Bellwether: Barbara Forever Director Brydie O'Connor & Matt Hixon & Elijah Stevens

Director Brydie O’Connor, editor Matt Hixon, and producer Elijah Stevens join us for a post-film discussion. This screening is free to Amherst Cinema Members. BARBARA FOREVER explores the films, archive, and ongoing cultural impact of experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, revealing her ingenious lifelong artistic effort to create and record lesbian histories, personal and societal. The film centers Barbara as a prism of the cultural ecosystems around her throughout her kaleidoscopic career—through the feminist and queer movements in 1970s San Francisco, the New York art world of the 1980s, the sex wars and rise of the radical New Queer Cinema genre of the 1990s, and Barbara’s reckoning with aging and mortality in the 2000s. Through the course of the film, Barbara shows us that the personal is not only political, the personal is historical. Looking to Barbara as one of the first filmmakers to put a lesbian life on screen that wasn’t there before, her work becomes a blueprint for a new generation of queer and radical artists to write our own histories into existence. This exploration of both Barbara Hammer’s life, work, archive, and her ongoing legacy provides an urgent, necessary story of queer life, feminist history and avant-garde cinema.