Film Review: She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry

The documentary She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry takes a thorough look at the American feminist movement from the mid-’60s through the early ’70s. The film concentrates on 1966 through 1971 and features in-depth interviews with numerous contributors and leaders of the movement in an effort to explore how the movement was started and what the struggle meant to its participants. From witches casting hexes to independent publishing, and from the political offices of Washington D.C. to the earliest women’s oriented self defense classes in Boston, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry explains the points of view and goals of many different groups involved in the struggle and how it varied from viewpoints of race, class and sexual orientation.

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry fills in the gaps of an often incomplete story by concentrating on interview subjects whose names are not readily familiar to most of us but whose stories, ideas and actions were the basis of the modern feminist movement as we know it.  This film is an important document in helping to explain and understand the roots of a movement that grew out of a stagnant societal view of women and a frustratingly close-minded counterculture that even dismissed the women in its organizations. Both majorly educational and very entertaining, this film comes highly recommended for anyone who is interested in political movements of the ’60s / ’70s or modern feminism in general.

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry opens at The Cable Car Cinema on Fri, March 27.

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry (2014); Directed By: Mary Dore