women in film

For those of you in NYC, try and catch this. One hip woman!

Films by Jessie Maple in Lincoln Center Series

The work of Jessie Maple, a filmmaker and the first African-American woman to join New York’s camera operators union in 1975, will be celebrated on Monday with the program “An Evening With Jessie Maple” at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (144 West 65th Street). Ms. Maple, who wrote a book, “How to Become a Union Camerawoman,” about her life and hard-fought battle to join the union, directed two narrative features.

When she couldn’t find a theater to hold the premiere of her first film, “Will” (1981), the story of a former athlete recovering from drug addiction, she and her husband, Leroy Patton, a cinematographer, founded the Harlem independent cinema 20 West in 1982. “Will” has been called “the first post-civil rights feature film directed by a woman.” The second feature, “Twice as Nice” (1989), is an intimate story of twin basketball players.

There will be a Q. and A. with Ms. Maple. Both features will be shown as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series “Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986.”