Art Film Series returns with fall lineup

Vashon Film Society presents “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry,” a bracing documentary about the rise of the women’s movement in the mid-sixties into the seventies, on Friday, October 2. The 9:30 film will kick off the fall season for VFS which programs First Friday screenings at the Vashon Theatre to coincide with the monthly Gallery Cruise.

Launching from Betty Friedan’s influential 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique,” film director Mary Dore charts the second wave of feminism that caused massive social change in America.  

With footage of marches and street theater, to the founding of NOW and the rise of feminist intellectuals such as Kate Millett, Susan Brownmiller, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, ”She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry” is an illuminating reminder of how much can change in a generation.

The activism of the era’s so-called “women’s libbers” caused groundbreaking cultural and legal changes in the United States and beyond. The film is a potent reminder that sexual harassment only recently has been taken seriously as a crime, and that accusations of rape once routinely met more suspicion about the victim’s reputation than the perpetrator’s character. And access to birth control and women’s health services was once highly dependent on where you lived and how much was in your bank account.

Vashon Film Society presents special feature and documentary shows on First Friday Gallery Cruise nights following the art walk. Admission to this Friday’s show at the Vashon Theatre is by donation.