Our bodies, our sex

Three pioneering portrait-films covering first-person intimate and confessional portrayals of previously unshown female stories. Cara de Vito, using a video camera, films a picture of her grandmother and her relationship with her violently abusive husband; Janie’s Janie follows a working-class woman in Newark who decides to take control of her life after years of physical and psychological abuse; the filmmaker Joyce Chopra uses the birth of her daughter to convey the conflict between motherhood and her career.