In the Abortion Clinic Film Collective series, we hear from medical directors and staff, mothers and daughters, criminal defense attorneys and advocates, about how their personal and professional lives have been affected post-Dobbs. Each portal provides a window into the broad and life-threatening ramifications of that Supreme Court decision and its devastating legacy for the health and well-being of our country and people.
https://www.abortionclinicfilmcollective.org/ (We suggest opening this on Chrome)
“The ACFC was born out of rage. After the overturn of Roe V Wade and the end to a woman’s federal right to abortion, I began reaching out to filmmakers from across the country. I asked if they would contribute to a project looking at the impact from different states’ perspectives, especially in those areas most affected. The Abortion Clinic Film Collective was born. In haste and with limited access to resources, seven films were created focusing on states from Arizona to Tennessee, South Dakota to Texas, and beyond. I directed one of the films, As Long as We Can, that chronicles the chaos Arizona was thrown into when abortion legality was thrown back to states.
We hope that each portal provides a window into the broad and life-threatening ramifications of significantly reducing our country’s access to abortion and the devastating legacy such confusion brings to the health of our country. It has been a profound and meaningful collaboration that continues to grow.”
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan
February, 2025
A Mile and a Half – Raymond Rea
2024, 5 minutes
The border between North Dakota and Minnesota is physically only a narrow river but legislatively a canyon. In the sister city straddling that border a move of a mile and a half saved lives.
Raymond Rea is a filmmaker and writer. His film work has screened widely including Light Field, Engauge, Mimesis, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival (Frameline), BFI, Translations, Lost & Found, Outfest, Los Angeles, Inside Out, Mix Mexico, Mix NYC, New Fest, Out on Screen, Reeling, Hamburg LGBT Film Festival, Melbourne GLBT Film Festival, Union Docs, ATA, Flex Fest, The Nightingale, and Aurora Picture Show, as well as other national and international spaces. His interactive work screened at the Plains Art Museum as part of the ND Human Rights Arts Festival. Ray’s writing has been produced at EXIT Stage Left, EXIT Mainstage in San Francisco and at Theatre B in Minnesota. Ray’s work often challenges assumptions, hints at theatricality, and uses a raw LoFi aesthetic to address complexities.
Contractions – Lynne Sachs
2024, 12 minutes
In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, we listen to an OB-GYN who can no longer perform abortions and a “Jane” who drives patients across state lines while a group of activists perform outside a women’s healthcare clinic.
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker, poet, and teacher living in Brooklyn, New York, and originally from Memphis. Over the last three decades, she has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of documentary, performance, and collage. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences, often from a personal, self-reflexive point of view. With each project, Sachs investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Sachs’ early works on celluloid offer a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing — a commitment which has grounded her vision ever since. In essay films such as “The House of Science: a museum of False Facts” (1991), “A Biography of Lilith” (1997), and “Tip of My Tongue” (2017), she specifically investigates issues around women’s bodies, politics, and control. Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker and the Getty, and at festivals including New York Film Festival, Sundance, Punto de Vista, DocAviv, and DocLisboa. Retrospectives of Sachs’ work have been presented at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, Cork, and China Women’s Film Festival.www.lynnesachs.com
As Long as We Can – Kristy Guevara-Flanagan
2024, 11.5 minutes
AS LONG AS WE CAN captures a day-in-the-life of an Arizona reproductive health clinic trying to navigate the turbulent aftermath of the 2022 Dobbs decision
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan / Project Creator and Director has been making documentary and experimental films about gender, the Latinx community, and representation for nearly two decades. Her first feature-length film, Going on 13 (2009, co-directed with Dawn Valadez), covers four years in the lives of four adolescent girls and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines (2013), traces the evolution and legacy of the comic book hero Wonder Woman as a way to reflect on society’s anxieties about women’s liberation. What Happened to Her (2016) explores our cultural obsession with images of the dead woman on screen. Guevara-Flanagan has won many accolades for her newest short film, Águilas (2021, co-directed with Maite Zubiaurre), about an all-volunteer organization that searches for migrants who go missing as they cross the border between Mexico and the United States. Águilas won Best Short Documentary at SXSW and was shortlisted for the Academy Awards. Her Sundance-supported feature documentary, Body Parts (2022), looks at the making of sex scenes in Hollywood.
Kristy had an abortion while in college that required multiple visits due to complications and is grateful for this abortion which allowed her to graduate from college.www.chuparosafilms.com
Retracing Our Steps – Kelly Gallagher
2024, 8 minutes
A woman reflects back on her time spent assisting abortion seekers when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land.
Kelly Gallagher / Director is a filmmaker, animator, and Associate Professor of Film at Syracuse University. Her creative work is rooted in themes of resistance, struggle, political histories, and personal explorations. Her award-winning films and commissioned animations have screened internationally at venues including: the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, the Smithsonian Institution, and Anthology Film Archives. Her most recent animations have also screened on Netflix and PBS. She’s presented solo programs of her work at institutions including: SFMOMA, Close-Up Cinema London, SF Cinematheque, and Wexner Center for the Arts. Kelly enthusiastically organizes and facilitates fun and inclusive film workshops, camps, and masterclasses for communities and groups of all ages, from Kentucky to California, from New York to Iowa and beyond.purpleriot.com
We Are About to Commit a Felony – Sasha Waters
2024, 4 minutes
Arson at a Planned Parenthood and the closing of a community clinic endanger the lives of women in Knoxville, TN. A teaching doctor reflects on what the post-Dobbs world means for her patients and her students, who are the next generation of reproductive care workers.
Sasha Waters, Director / Knoxville, TN is a moving image artist and Professor of Film at Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 1998, Sasha has produced and directed 18 documentary and experimental films, 14 of which originate in 16mm. Her most recent feature documentary, Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable, won a Special Jury Prize for “Best Feminist Reconsideration of a Male Artist” at the SXSW Film Festival. Following its theatrical run, the film aired on the PBS series American Masters. Sasha’s past documentary, experimental and essay films have screened at the Telluride Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kassel Dokfest, IMAGES in Toronto, Microscope Gallery, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, the Tribeca, Ann Arbor, Woodstock, Chicago Underground and Big Sky Documentary Film Festivals among other international venues.
Sasha had an abortion while in college, became a member of the Ann Arbor Committee to Defend Abortion Rights, and participated in many clinic defense actions during the “abortion wars” of the late 1980s. www.pieshake.com
Hemorrhage – Ruth Hayes
2024, 4 minutes
Overturning Roe v. Wade motivated me to create Hemorrhage. Seeking an outlet for my anger, I animated a sequence of crayon and watercolor rubbings of a coat hanger. Through iterative processes of filming and repeated rubbings, and incorporating images and text appropriated from the Sunday print edition of The New York Times, I further developed the sequence. With Peter Randlette’s score featuring voices sampled from the Supreme Court arguments in Dobbs, my initial formal experiments evolved into an expression of outrage against increasingly repressive forces eviscerating women’s rights and endangering our health and well-being.
Ruth Hayes animates in film, video and pre-cinema devices, experimenting with form and content while exploring visual phenomena, engaging in political critique, and mining personal experience. Ruth’s recent projects involve 16mm cameraless processes, however the U.S. Supreme Court decision eviscerating American women’s rights to bodily autonomy compelled her to return to animating on paper. For Hemorrhage, she integrated rubbings, appropriated imagery and voices sampled from arguments before the Supreme Court. Ruth learned to animate at Harvard, earned her MFA in Experimental Animation from California Institute of the Arts, and taught animation in the interdisciplinary curriculum of The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington for 25 years, retiring with emerita status in 2021.www.randommotion.com
Catch Us On The Way Down – Cali M. Banks
2025, 7 minutes
A poetic and reflexive documentary approach to reproductive healthcare access in North Carolina, specifically on Indigenous reservations.
Cali M. Banks (Munsee Lenape/Scottish) is a lens-based artist based in Syracuse, NY. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices from the University of Colorado Boulder, and a BA in Art and Technology and Global Health Studies from Allegheny College. Cali is the Communications Coordinator for Light Work, and is also an Adjunct Professor of Photography, Video Art and Filmmaking for Syracuse University, Pratt Munson, and Indiana University campuses. Cali is also a 2024 En Foco Photography Fellow, and recently received the VIsionary Project Award from Film Photo Award. Her artistic practice reclaims identity through auto-ethnographic, experimental photography and filmmaking. Her work explores personal and collective histories, relational intimacies, and the expansion of narrow, flattened definitions of indigenous art. In recent times, she has exhibited work during Art Basel Miami and Every Woman Biennial London, and other notable venues such as Smack Mellon, RedLine Contemporary Art Center, the Everson Museum of Art, Atlanta Film Festival, and Anthology Film Archives. Her work has also been published on Lomography, Lenscratch, and Rolling Stone France. calimariebanks.com
Eggshells – Luiza Parvu
2025, 11:40 minutes
A transcontinental daughter-mother conversation about the life of Romanian women under dictatorship and patriarchy is catalyzed by sea changes in the Arizona abortion law, Orthodox Easter egg painting, and the migrant experience. Through sisterhood and solidarity, the film seeks to create common ground and heal intergenerational trauma.
Luiza Parvu is a filmmaker and visual artist, an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University’s Poitier Film School, a Senior Programmer at the Mimesis Documentary Festival in Boulder and an affiliate of the Melikian Center at ASU. A member of the European Film Academy, she has directed and edited feature and short films that have screened at festivals worldwide, including Sundance, BFI London, Karlovy Vary and Tribeca. Her work explores identity, memory, and transformation, often in conversation with other artists, scientists or collectives. From human migration and environmental transformation to intergenerational reverberations of oppression, in projects produced across North America, Europe and Eurasia, she seeks often-invisible connections between the past and present to imagine possibilities for a better future. She is an alumna of NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and a co-founder of Root Films, a Bucharest-based production company that sustains her research, creation, and community-building. rootfilms.org
Freedom From (Working Title) – Lori Felker
Work in Progress
Chicago, IL, 2024 – After many delays, a noise ordinance was passed to protect the work going on at a family planning clinic in the middle of the city. Since Dobbs v. Jackson, Chicago doctors, patients, and escorts had been struggling against increasing protests using amplified sounds, sometimes made by hundreds of protestors,which shook the walls and windows and drowned out important communications inside the building. This is the story “Freedom of Speech” vs Freedom from Harassment.
Lori Felker is a filmmaker, teacher, programmer, and performer. Her films study the ineloquent, frustrating, and chaotic qualities of human interaction and have explored empathy, discontinuity, grief, and multiple dimensions. She eschews any particular style or genre in favor of letting content and concerns guide form. She loves every facet of filmmaking and has worked as a cinematographer, editor, and/or actor for various artists and directors and has programmed for the likes of the Chicago Underground Film Festival and Slamdance and was a projectionist at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Her award-winning short films and one feature documentary have screen internationally, and she is the recipient of various grants/fellowships including a Fulbright (Berlin), a Wexner Center Residency and is a 2025 Creative Capital Awardee. She lives in Chicago and is an Assistant Professor at DePaul University. Safe and legal access to health services and reproductive care in all states is really important to her. Her film Spontaneous (2020) about her experience having a miscarriage while out of state is available on The Criterion Channel. www.felkercommalori.com