Janet Goldwater
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.
Janet Goldwater earned an M.F.A. from Boston University. She has taught at Sweet Briar College, Rowan University, Temple University and the Art Institute of Boston. Goldwater served on the boards of the Women’s Medical Fund, the Philadelphia chapter of the ACLU-PA, and NARAL-PA. She is currently a patient escort at the Philadelphia Women’s Center and a founding member of the Philadelphia Support Network (for abortion clinics). (06/20)
Available Title(s):
Abortion Helpline, This is Lisa
A film by Janet Goldwater, 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 Janet Goldwater, 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 Janet Goldwater, 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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