Karen Pearlman

I want to make a film about women

Karen Pearlman

Richard James Allen, Victoria Haralabidou

'I want to make a film about women' is a speculative documentary love letter to Russian constructivist women. The new Soviet Union of the 1920s championed equality for women and great innovation in the creative arts. Until it didn't. Looking back at that time, history remembers the men who were celebrated and then shut down. But women were there, too, and they were influential, powerful and brilliant. 'I want to make a film about women' gazes in to a creative communal kitchen and watches these women transform it into a workshop, then a stage set, then a film, all the while juggling noisy men and the wolves of history. It imagines what the revolutionary women artists of the 1920s said, what they did, and what they might have created had it not been for Stalin's suppression.

After the Facts

Karen Pearlman

Esfir Shub, Elizaveta Svilova

In the early years of cinema, editors were usually women. This short documentary looks at how they wielded power, and how their work was made invisible.

Woman with an Editing Bench

Karen Pearlman

Inspired by the woman who edited "Man with a Movie Camera" (1929), "Woman with an Editing Bench" reveals the personal impact of Stalin’s censorship of cinema on a woman navigating politics, bureaucracy and the impetuous outbursts of collaborators to create something beautiful despite the odds.

Digital Afterlives

Richard James Allen, Karen Pearlman

A witty, whimsical meditation on free will, identity, and the afterlife with a touch of Franz Liszt.