In the 1950s, thousands of “social guidance” films were shown to shape behavior according to traditional gender norms. Nice Girls Don’t Ask excavates footage from vintage educational films to cast a subversive but humorous lens on the proffered rules and expectations. What was the cost of this behavioral straitjacket for a generation of women? Is the pendulum creeping back?
Biography:
Jan Krawitz’s independently produced films have been exhibited at film festivals in the US and abroad. Her documentary Perfect Strangers follows one woman as she embarks on a four-year journey of twists and turns, determined to give away one of her kidneys. Krawitz’s previous film Big Enough, a documentary about dwarfs, was broadcast on the national PBS series P.O.V., Netflix and in eighteen countries. Her documentaries Mirror Mirror, In Harm’s Way, Little People and Drive-in Blues were also screened on national PBS. Little People was nominated for a national Emmy Award and was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Jan’s short film Styx is in the permanent collection of MoMA. Jan has had one-woman retrospectives of her films at the Portland Art Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Rice Media Center, Austin Film Society and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. She was awarded artist residencies at Yaddo, Bogliasco, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and Docs in Progress. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award. Jan is a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
