Santa Fe Film Festival 2009

THE HERETICS uncovers the inside story of the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement through the eyes of Joan Braderman who arrives in NYC in 1971 to become a filmmaker. By chance, she joins a feminist art collective at the epicenter of the 1970’s art world in lower Manhatten.Unlike more traditional “documentaries,” the film is framed by striking new digital graphics and animations, and includes interviews with former collective members, archival footage from the 1970s, and documents of the Heresies collective, which published HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics from 1977 to 1992. THE HERETICS views the collective in the context of the larger second-wave movement, which was made up of thousands who met in small, unique and private groups to discuss what it meant to be female, to begin to remake their worlds and to build independent institutions embodying their vision of a gender-equal society. Twenty-four of the hundreds of Heresies members—now scattered around the globe and working as artists, writers, architects, painters, filmmakers, designers, editors, curators, and teachers—speak intimately with the filmmaker about the extraordinary times they shared, challenging the terms of gender and power and reimagining the lives of generations to come.