Barbara Attie
The EMMY® nominated filmmakers Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater have collaborated on award-winning documentaries for national and international broadcast, as well as wide-spread educational and advocacy use, since 1990. Attie and Goldwater’s work has been recognized with a prestigious Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Leeway Transformation Award, and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in Media. Their previous documentaries on reproductive rights include Rosita (HBO Latin America, 2006) the story of a 9-year-old Nicaraguan girl whose rape and pregnancy resulted in a political and religious uproar that resonated across Latin America; Legal But Out of Reach (2000), about women whose personal struggles lead them to choose abortion, only to find that the lack of public funding made that choice inaccessible; and Motherless: A Legacy of Loss from Illegal Abortion (1992) about children orphaned when their mothers died after back-alley abortions before Roe. v. Wade. Additional independent documentaries produced and directed by Attie and Goldwater for national public television broadcast are the following: BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez (2015), a biography of the renowned African American poet and activist; Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter (2009), an ITVS co-production also supported by Sundance, about a Malian woman seeking asylum in the US to protect her daughter from female genital cutting; Maggie Growls (2003, ITVS co-production) a whimsical biography of Gray Panther founder Maggie Kuhn; and Landowska: Uncommon Visionary (1997), a biography of the celebrated harpsichordist Wanda Landowska.
Barbara Attie received an M.F.A. from Temple University, where she was named to the School of Communications and Theater Hall of Fame. Her documentary about teenage girls who joined the resistance movement during the Holocaust, Daring to Resist (with Martha Lubell), was broadcast nationally on PBS and named “one of the 10 best documentaries of 2000” by The Boston Globe. Attie is former board chair of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women and served on the Board of Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania.
Available Title(s):
Abortion Helpline, This is Lisa
A film by Barbara Attie, 2019, 13 min, Color
ABORTION HELPLINE, THIS IS LISA, shortlisted for Oscars 2021 for Best Documentary Short Subject and winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Shorts at AFI Docs 2020, is a powerful short documentary that exposes how economic stigma and cruel legislation determines who in America has access to abortion. At a women’s health fund in Philadelphia,…
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Mrs. Goundo's Daughter
A film by Barbara Attie, 2009, 60 min, Color
Mrs. Goundo is fighting to remain in the United States. But it’s not just because of the ethnic conflict and drought that has plagued her native Mali. Threatened with deportation, her two-year-old daughter could be forced to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM), like 85 percent of women and girls in Mali. Using rarely cited grounds…
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Maggie Growls
A film by Barbara Attie, 2002, 56 min, Color
MAGGIE GROWLS is a portrait of the amazing, canny, lusty, charming and unstoppable Maggie Kuhn (1905-1995), who founded the Gray Panthers (the nation’s leading progressive senior advocacy organization) in 1970 after being forced to retire from a job she loved at the age of 65. Her outrage and determination fueled a political chain reaction that…
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Daring to Resist: Three Women Face the Holocaust
A film by Barbara Attie, 1999, 57 min, Color
Why would a young person choose resistance rather than submission during Hitler's reign of terror while her world was collapsing around her? In this gripping documentary, three Jewish women answer this question by recalling their lives as teenagers in occupied Holland, Hungary and Poland, when they refused to remain passive as the Nazis rounded up…
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