Film Events

Women Director Series - Born in Flames

Thursday, July 23, 2026 at 7:30 PM

Certain Women is a film series at the Orinda Theater highlighting women directors, with shorts to precede each feature

Selected and Introduced by your local programmers/projectionists... Linda Izcali Scobie & Chloe Ginnever

BORN IN FLAMES, (1983) Directed by Lizzie Borden

A blistering rallying cry issued loud, clear, and unapologetically queer, Lizzie Borden's explosive postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a revolution that supposedly transformed the country into a social-democratic utopia. In reality, racism, sexism, and economic inequality are as virulent as ever, and a band of radicals—led by Black, lesbian, and working-class women—join forces to fight back. Told through a furiously fractured, kinetically edited flurry of television news broadcasts, pirate radio transmissions, agitprop, and protests shot guerrilla-style on the streets of New York City, Born in Flames is a shock wave of feminist futurism that's both an essential document of its time and radically ahead of it.

Preceded by:

MUTINY, (1983) Directed by Abigail Child - 16mm

"This movie is a new kind of classic, it has invented once and for all the machine-gun sound of explosives and composed sentences with speeded-up speech and wild singing, laughter, hardly [at] all understandable, with violins screeching like falling bombs and a Hispanic grind dance .... There are tender closeups in interviews with women, and marvelous documents of dancers, street performers, all races & styles. These are brave and straight-talking people; this is a feminist film, and it is important. All the sound makes a talky song of many voices." - Anne Robertson, X-Dream

"Plastically a marvel, a discerning powerhouse performance." - Ken Jacobs