For the first screening of 2025, The Future of Film is Female presents an essential documentary about motherhood, witches, and mental health by Elizabeth Sankey. To make an additional $10 donation to The Future of Film is Female, select the “Event + Donation” ticket on the checkout screen.

Witches are figures of solace in this intimate documentary, which unravels the social stigmas that women have endured across centuries. Between affecting interviews and vividly illustrative film clips, Elizabeth Sankey concocts a potion that brims with courage, compassion, and healing insight.

“Ushering her own long-standing obsession with movies to the fore, Sankey draws on a wealth of footage spanning the entirety of film history- with clips as far ranging as THE WIZARD OF OZ , GIRL, INTERRUPTED, and ROSEMARY’S BABY – to make that point that our shared cultural representation of witches says a lot more about how we view women, motherhood, and mental health. Sankey places her own personal experiences alongside interviews with academics and other women with shared experiences within a larger historical context that relates back to the witch hunts of past centuries and up to the way contemporary cultural norms continue to fail women. Witches functions simultaneously as stirring personal testimony, critical ode to cinephilia, and a vital feminist history lesson” .––Cara Cusumano, Tribeca Festival

Before Witches, we’ll screen a short written and directed by FOFIF filmmaker Richa Rudola:
COW HEAVY AND FLORAL (2024)
A postpartum writer struggles to make a deadline as she experiences an identity crisis between her various personas. (15 min)