Isa Cruz

As the Oscars quickly approach, many in the film world are directing their attention to blockbusters like “The Substance” and “The Brutalist.” This week, members of the Bowdoin community got a taste of a very different side of what film has to offer, as independent filmmaker Courtney Stephens came to campus to screen two of her works: “Terra Femme” and “The American Sector.”

The films were screened in the VAC’s Beam Classroom on Monday and Tuesday night and were followed by brief Q&A sessions led by Stephens. Multiple departments across campus sponsored Stephens’ visit, as her works touch on a broad range of themes such as the Cold War, immigration, women’s history and travel.

“Terra Femme,” a compilation of amateur travel videos without dialogue scored by Sarah Davachi that Stephens narrated live, highlights the stories of women who traveled the world and documented their experiences by film. The film was inspired, Stephens said, by her curiosity about amateur female filmmakers, as well as her interest in travel.

“[These women] were making art in very different, more private ways. And maybe they wouldn’t have called it art, but they were kind of expressing or exploring their points of view in that way,” Stephens said. “How do you retrieve small voices?… Trying to find a new value system and not just … trying to insert them into the professional history, but letting them have an amateur history … letting that be a viable and valuable site created. I think that puts these films less in dialogue with nonfiction filmmaking and more in dialogue with the history of women’s arts and things that were always taken for granted and never really given their due.”

The experimental nature of the film, with a live narration by Stephens herself, created a unique experience for the audience.

“It felt a lot more personal, having the director be right there and narrating the story she created herself. It was really personal, almost intimate, [because] she was telling us that story in person,” Giovanna Parnoff ’28, who attended the screening, said.

Stephens’ other film, “The American Sector” tracks pieces of the Berlin Wall located across the United States, showing how history is preserved, retold and refurbished across different spaces. In interviews with strangers and owners of the wall’s fragments, the film features highly personal perspectives on the Cold War period and its resonances today.

“We tried not to make a super cynical film, but oftentimes [installations of the wall] support an institutional objective. So it’s installed at Warner Brothers because it’s talking about a time without free speech and free flow of information,” Stephens said in the Q&A session following the screening. “It tended to tell us how history is told by institutions and by people in power.… How history ends up getting written by institutional logic, and how that differs from the way private memory functions.”

Tanya Goldman, visiting assistant professor of cinema studies, spoke on the importance of film as a medium in crafting a complex, active understanding of history.

“I think moving images make us act, react and elicit responses more than just reading on a page. That impulse to capture the world we’ve just always sort of had forever…. I think that [film] allows people to really engage with the past in a way that sometimes just reading about it doesn’t,” Goldman said.

Both feature length films, “Terra Femme” and “The American Sector” approach film from a contemplative, artistic standpoint. John Fireman, visiting assistant professor of visual arts, spoke on Stephens’s ability to wield the medium with depth and intention.

“Personally as an artist, I’ve come to understand that the work I make is not designed to play in big theaters or appeal to everybody. It’s designed to appeal to a smaller amount of people very directly, and I think Courtney has the same confidence and commitment to her own vision,” Fireman said. “That’s a type of artistic practice that I always will have tremendous respect for.”

In an interview with the Orient, Stephens encouraged Bowdoin students to explore the numerous creative possibilities of filmmaking, without restraining themselves to more “traditional” forms of the craft.

“In terms of the films themselves, I hope that maybe [they] give the sense that you can go beyond what you know, that you can walk all kinds of paths and be true to your own strange preoccupations and be idiosyncratic,” Stephens said. “There are a lot of different realms of filmmaking, and I’m happy I can suggest those possibilities.”