Bernadette Wegenstein

Leonard Bernstein’s protégée Marin Alsop reveals how she smashed the glass ceiling to become an internationally renowned conductor.

In the age of surgically enhanced beauty and reality television, how do we perceive body image? MADE OVER IN AMERICA combines the style of reality television with experimental film to weave together the voices of producers and consumers, surgeons and their patients, clinical psychologists, media theorists, and youth who are coming of age in a culture where bodies seem to be customizable. Together they form a picture of how the desire for a better self operates within consumer culture and how this desire is fed by media, the makeover industry and culture at large.

The story of Leo Bretholz, who was born to Jewish parents in Vienna in 1921 and fled Nazi Austria in 1938 at the urging of his mother. Starting with this, the documentary depicts the community of Holocaust survivors in Baltimore, one of the largest in the United States, and creates a touching portrait of the Austrian-American and the Polish emigrant Bluma Shapiro.

Through magical realist animations in the style of baroque chiaroscuro, Devoti Tutti returns to the martyred Saint Agatha of Catania a voice she never had. Alongside a chorus of the citizens of Catania and the stories of real abuse survivors, Devoti Tutti shows how a community’s reverence for its saint masks misogynist realities. In her cell Agatha is kept company by her breasts, which her tormenters severed from her body—a reminder of the violence she suffered, but also of her refusal to submit to a man’s desire. Together with the flying breasts, Agatha escapes from the chamber where she has been held prisoner for two millennia and flies out over the ocean and into her own self-creation.

Four strikingly different women undergo treatment at a comprehensive breast center presided over by the inimitable and searingly honest veteran surgeon Dr. Lauren Schnaper. She believes that fear, ignorance, and pink-ribbon culture are fueling an explosive rate of unnecessary mastectomies in America. Blending medical archival footage with extensive 'collateral damage' suffered by our four women - repeated loss of implants, blood infections caused by multiple surgical procedures, cosmetic nipple exchanges, reactions to cadaver's skin that is used to house breast implants - we learn that breast reconstruction post-mastectomy is no 'boob job.' As Dr. Schnaper advocates breast conservation and debunks breast cancer myths, so the myth of St. Agatha, the Sicilian martyred saint of the breast, offers a commentary on our own confused contemporary moment.