Meema Spadola
Directing
Biography
Meema Spedola is a producer, director, and writer in television and radio living in Brooklyn, a short subway ride from Red Hook. She has produced documentaries for PBS, HBO, Cinemax, Sundance Channel, and Public Radio. Her past work includes the Independent Lens documentary Guns and Mothers, about two mothers on opposite sides of the gun control debate, co-produced with director Thom Powers. Spadola’s ITVS documentary Our House premiered on PBS in 2000 and featured the sons and daughters in five diverse gay and lesbian American families. It received jury awards for best documentary at both the New York and Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals, and has been broadcast worldwide. Spadola and Powers’s documentaries Breasts and Private Dicks, about women’s and men’s attitudes about their bodies, have been broadcast on HBO to critical acclaim and high ratings, and interviews produced by Spadola were featured in HBO’s 2001 adaptation of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. Spadola produced the four-part series Shorts From the Underground for the Sundance Channel, and her radio documentaries have appeared on Public Radio’s This American Life. She is the author of Breasts: Our Most Public Private Part (Wildcat Canyon Press), based on her documentary of the same name, and was a contributor to Out of the Ordinary (St. Martin’s Press) a collection of essays by sons and daughters with LGBT parents. Her knitting patterns have appeared in Stitch N’ Bitch (Workman Press) and the magazine Interweave Knits. Spadola grew up in Searsmont, Maine and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College.
Known For
This controversial work, created and performed by Eve Ensler, debuted off-off-Broadway in 1996 and soon rode a wave of national acclaim. Now, the intimacy of Ensler's original show has been lovingly brought to the screen. Capturing her unique performance, the film also follows Ensler as she explores the creative impetus behind the monologues and conducts a series of new interviews as inspiring as those that brought about the original work
The Vagina Monologues
Twenty-two women (ranging in age from 11 to 84), with 41 breasts, talk about their breasts; most are topless as they speak. They talk about adolescence, bras, commercial images of women's figures, having implants or, in one case, a breast reduction, health problems with silicone, doctors' exams ("I think you have a throat infection, let me examine your breasts"), breasts as power tools and as objects of pleasure, cancer, living with mastectomies, and the effects of time and gravity. Two mother-daughter teams and two strippers participate. The women (and the girls) are humorous, straightforward, reflective, and good-natured about their bodies and their selves
Breasts: A Documentary
Men, most of them naked, talk about their penises. They range from 17 to 70+, all from the U.S. The interviews are edited around themes: discovery, early sexual experiences, masturbation, size, oral sex, libido, performance, disease and maladies, maturity. A lexicographer discusses language, especially slang; a few archival educational-film clips divide the topics. Images and stories mix with facts and philosophical reflection. The usually private becomes public.
Private Dicks: Men Exposed
Children of lesbian mothers talk frankly about their mothers' coming out, their own homophobia, and how they feel about being raised by lesbian mothers.
My Mother's Secret: Sons and Daughters of Lesbian Mothers
No description available.
Red Hook Justice
This film is a frank examination of the diverse experiences of children of gay and lesbian parents. The documentary profiles sixteen sons and daughters between the ages of four and twenty-three in five diverse families who are facing the usual highs and lows of growing up while encountering varied reactions from extended family, classmates, teachers, neighbors, and public officials.