7:30pm Wednesday, April 12, 2023
137 Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst
The Janes
(Emma Pildes & Tia Lessin, USA, 101 min)
In the spring of 1972, police raided an apartment on the South Side of Chicago where seven women who were part of a clandestine network were arrested. Using code names, fronts, and safe houses to protect themselves and their work, these women had built an underground service for women seeking safe, affordable, illegal abortions. They called themselves “Jane”. The Janes tells the story of a group of unlikely outlaws who defied the law, the Church, and the Mob at great personal peril to help women in need.
Co-sponsored by:
Five College Reproductive Health, Rights, & Justice (RHRJ)
Film Screening
followed by
Discussion and Q&A with
Emma Pildes & Tia Lessin
(Directors)
Introduced by
Laura Briggs
Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
UMass Amherst
Free and open to the public.
Emma Pildes and Tia Lessin
(Directors)
Emma Pildes- Emmy-nominated filmmaker Emma Pildes has an extensive background in, and boundless love for, non-fiction storytelling. The Janes is Emma’s directorial debut. As one of Pentimento Productions’ principal producers, Emma produced Spielberg, Jane Fonda in Five Acts, and Very Ralph — all for HBO Documentary Films. Spielberg had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival in 2017 and was later nominated for an Emmy. Jane Fonda in Five Acts had its world premiere at Sundance Film Festival in 2018 and its international premiere at Cannes Film Festival. The film was nominated for the 2019 Emmys. At PBS’ American Masters, Emma helped to produce the Emmy and Peabody-award-winning LennoNYC, Emmy-award-winning Inventing David Geffen, as well as American Masters: Billie Jean King. Born and raised in Chicago, Emma graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and is based in Brooklyn, NY. She is a member of the Directors Guild of America.
Tia Lessin– Tia Lessin was nominated for an Academy Award for her work as a director and producer of the Hurricane Katrina survival story Trouble the Water, winner of the 2008 Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the Gotham Independent Film Award. She directed and produced Citizen Koch, about the rise of the Tea Party in the Midwest, which also premiered at Sundance and was shortlisted for an Oscar in 2014. Lessin directed The Janes, about an underground abortion service, which will premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. In 2001, Tia received the Sidney Hillman Award for Broadcast Journalism for directing the documentary short Behind the Labels about the labor trafficking of garment workers in the U.S. Saipan. Lessin was a producer of Palme D’Or winning Fahrenheit 9/11, Academy Award-winning Bowling for Columbine, and the Grammy-winning No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. She produced the film Where to Invade Next and executive produced Fahrenheit 11/9. Her work on the 1998/99 television series The Awful Truth earned her two Emmy nominations, one arrest, and a lifetime ban from Disneyland. Lessin is a past fellow of the Open Society Institute and the Sundance Institute and has served as an advisor to IFP, Sundance, and Creative Capital artists. Her filmmaking has been supported by The Bertha Foundation, Chicken & Egg, Cinereach, Creative Capital, The Ford Foundation’s JustFilms, Fork Films, the International Documentary Association’s Pare Lorentz Fund, the MacArthur Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Directors Guild of America. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Lessin’s mother and grandmother were Jewish refugees who fled Nazi-occupied Europe and found sanctuary in Trinidad and later in the U.S., Her grandfather was imprisoned at Auschwitz. Their experiences have informed the questions about survival and resistance that have guided Lessin’s filmmaking.
Laura Briggs
(UMass Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexualities Studies)
Briggs is an expert on U.S. and international child welfare policy and on transnational and transracial adoption. She received her A.B. from Mount Holyoke College, her M.T.S. from Harvard University, and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Brown University. Her research studies the relationship between reproductive politics, neoliberalism, and the longue durée of U.S. empire and imperialism. Briggs has also been at the forefront of rethinking the field and frameworks of transnational feminisms. Briggs’s newly published book Taking Children: A History of American Terror(University of California Press, 2020), examines the 400-year-old history of the United States’ use of taking children from marginalized communities—from the taking of Black and Native children during America’s founding to the Donald Trump’s policy of family separation for Central American migrants and asylum seekers at the U.S./Mexico border—as a violent tool for political ends. Briggs also recently co-edited a special issue of Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism on “Radical Transnationalisms: Reimagining Solidarities, Violence, Empires” that brings transnational feminism studies into a new light by developing new and alternative analytical frameworks and exploring alternative or forgotten genealogies of the field. Briggs’s new book project, entitled The Future is Born in Small Places: The Gendered (Bio)Politics of Freedom, Debt Imperialism, and Unnatural Disaster in the Caribbean, focuses on historical and contemporary uses of debt in the United States and the Caribbean as a political tool of disenfranchisement, expropriation, and necropolitics. In particular, she takes a critical eye to the reproductive and gendered consequences of the Financial Oversight & Management Board for Puerto Rico.Brigg’s other books include How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump(University of California Press, 2016);Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption(Duke University Press, 2012), winner of the James A. Rawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians); Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico(University of California Press, 2002); and International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children(New York University Press, 2009), co-edited with Diana Marre. Her writing and research have also appeared in Adoption and Culture, American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Scholar and the Feminist Online; Radical History Review, and American Indian Quarterly.
Briggs is also a public intellectual whose work has been featured in court cases, podcasts, and journalism, including on National Public Radio, Slate, PBS, New Republic, Indian Country Today, and Ms. magazine. aShe began her intellectual career as a journalist for Gay Community News. She regularly teaches seminars on transnational feminisms, reproductive politics, and contemporary feminist theory. She has been part of the organizing collectives of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History and the Thinking Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute. She is also an editor for the American Crossroadsseries and member of advisory board for the Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the Twenty-First Century series at the University of California Press.