SORORITY CONFIDENTIAL tells the unexamined story of racial discrimination in one of the largest and most exclusive private clubs in America: white college sororities.
SYNOPSIS
This feature length documentary film highlights the stories of a group of women -- young and older, Black and white – who were involved in two discriminatory acts: one in 1966 in the North, one in 2013 in the South. The film includes interviews, conversations, animation, scenes from a battleground, narration, clues to a mystery, and emails from an anonymous whistleblower. Family photos and archival images accompany the filmmaker’s journey in the present.
Director Statement
My pre-filmmaker career was as a grantmaker supporting community-based development and cultural expression, and my experience working in Latin America allowed me to support movements for economic opportunity, political representation, and justice for the crimes of the dictatorships. Those are the issues that I’ve worked on as a filmmaker since 2007. But in 2013, when I read about an incident of sorority discrimination that mirrored my own experience 50 years earlier, I realized that a documentary film focused on the white sororities could contribute to a national conversation about the institutional barriers to equality and equity.
Supporter Statement
[Sorority Confidential]… screened at the 2018 DDNRC Conference, added a well-received and necessary visual narrative to discussions of race, power and identity dialogues on college campuses.
-Chair, 2018 Difficult Dialogues National Resource Center Conference
I work with undergraduate students, many of whom are in Greek fraternities and sororities. This can help them understand their legacy.
-Diversity Officer, private university
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Kathryn Smith Pyle
Director/ Producer Kathryn Smith Pyle is a Sundance Institute Fellow (2011 Documentary Edit and Story Lab and 2009 Creative Producers Lab). She co-produced the feature-length film, Niños de la Memoria/ Children of Memory (2012), about human rights issues in El Salvador, which was broadcast on PBS and screened in various film festivals in the U.S. and Latin America. She is director-producer of Farm Labor (2013), an online short documentary film and website project in support of comprehensive immigration reform. She is a consulting producer for Border South (2019) and Almost Sunrise (2016). She is a former Flaherty Film Seminar board member and a former grant-maker in Philadelphia, Latin America, and Europe. She writes about social issue documentaries and has a doctorate in social policy with a focus on race-related issues from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a 2019 Independence Foundation Visual Arts Fellow.
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ABOUT YOUR DONATION
Women Make Movies (WMM), Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit media arts organization registered with the New York Charities Bureau of New York State and accepts charitable donations on behalf of this project. Your donation will be spent by the filmmaker(s) toward the production and completion of this media project. No services or goods are provided by Women Make Movies, the filmmaker(s) or anyone else associated with this project in exchange for your charitable donation.
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