Jill Godmilow

born in 1943, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

self-taught

Godmilow has earned a substantial reputation as a film producer / director during more than three decades. Her Antonia: A Portrait Of The Woman was the first independently produced American documentary to enjoy extensive theatrical exhibition in the United States and broadcast in eleven foreign countries. It received an Academy Award Nomination and the Independent New York Film Critics Award for Best Documentary.

Her 1984 feature about the Polish Solidarity movement, Far From Poland, was heralded for breaking new ground in the documentary genre with its radical deconstructive approach and juxtaposition of fact and fiction. Her feminist "fiction" feature, Waiting For The Moon, about the lives of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, won 1st prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1987 and enjoyed extensive theatrical and video distribution. She completed her 1995 feature film, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith - a cinematic translation of performance artist Ron Vawter's extraordinary solo theatre piece about two infamous queers, both of whom died of AIDS in the late 1980's. Her 1998 film, the provocative What Farocki Taught - in distribution by arsenal experimental with a 16mm print -, contains an exact replica of the German filmmaker Harun Farocki’s 1969, black & white film "Inextinguishable Fire"—about the production of Napalm, the abuses of human labor, and about documentary filmmaking—sets a challenge to the left liberal documentary to re-think its strategies. In 2001 she released a six hour, three disc DVD archive, Lear’87 Archive (Condensed) on the work of the renown New York City theatrical collective, Mabou Mines, on a fully gender-reversed production of Shakespeare’s “King Lear”.

Godmilow's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and others. She lives in New York City and South Bend, Indiana. She teaches filmmaking and critical courses in the department of Film, Television and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. She is working on an experimental, non-fiction film about the lives of animals in the cinema.

To read more about her films and varies articles on cinema: http://www.nd.edu/~jgodmilo/

in distribution

What Farocki Taught, 1998