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Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers Aims to Showcase the Golden Age of Women Directors

In early 2015, Kino Lorber mounted a successful crowd-funding campaign for Pioneers of African-American Cinema. The campaign raised over $53,000, far surpassing its original $35,000 goal.

Now Kino Lorber is hoping to repeat that success with its new Kickstarter campaign for their upcoming release Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers. So far, they’ve raised more than $20,000 towards the $44,000 goal.

“You wouldn’t know it looking back at the last 90 years of film history, but at one time, it was not uncommon to have women behind the camera in Hollywood,” says writer-director Ileana Douglas in the campaign video (above).

Presented in association with the Library of Congress (and drawing from the collections of other world-renowned film archives), Pioneers will be the largest commercially-released video collection of films by women directors, and will focus on American films made between 1910 and 1929 — a crucial chapter of our cultural history.

The collection will be comprised of new HD restorations of both the most important films of the era, but also the lesser-known (but no less historically important) works: short films, fragments, isolated chapters of incomplete serials. The five-Blu-ray box set will include approximately twenty hours of material — showcasing the work of these under-appreciated filmmakers, while illuminating the gradual changes in how women directors were perceived (and treated) by the Hollywood establishment.

Find out more details here.

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