Heretics, guerrillas, and artists at the MooreWomenArtists Film Festival

African-American women reclaim and define their own voices; the Guerrilla Girls blast the myth of the “heroic male painter,” and Hollywood’s depiction of artists comes under a whirlwind microscope in the MooreWomenArtists Film Festival, with free screenings and discussions running April 1-3.

The fest begins with Demetria Royals’s Conjure Women on Friday, April 1 at 7pm (85 minutes). This “performance-based documentary” follows choreographer and dancer Anita Gonzalez (of Urban Bush Women and Bandana Women), performance artist and director Robbie McCauley, photographer Carrie Mae Weems, and Grammy-winning jazz vocalist and composer Cassandra Wilson. According to Moore, these artists work to “reclaim their ‘africanisms,’ an intuitive experience of what their foreparents had to deny if they were to survive.”

On Saturday, April 2 at 2pm, Moore screens Amy Harrison’s Guerrillas in Our Midst, and then Joan Braderman’s The Heretics. Guerrillas in Our Midst (35 minutes) spotlights the revolutionary anonymous activists the Guerrilla Girls, who have been combatting racism and sexism in the art world since 1985. The Heretics (95 minutes) is “the exhilarating inside story of the New York feminist art collective that produced Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics” (a journal that ran from 1977-1992). Filmmaker Braderman joined the group in 1975, and reconnects with 28 other members of the collective across the world.

On Saturday night, from 7-9pm, the festival continues with another double feature: Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg’s Artist and Danielle Beverly’s Learning to Swallow. Artist is a 10-minute “video voyage [that] spans centuries of art and art-making to reveal how five decades of mainstream media have perceived the creative process and creators themselves.” It’s a biting and bite-sized satire of Hollywood’s typical “one-dimensional representations” of artists.

Learning to Swallow (89 minutes) follows four years in the life of artist Patsy Desmond, who seemed to have it all in her career, but battled bipolar disorder. A suicide attempt damaged her digestive system so badly that she’s unable to swallow, but she ultimately “renews her pact with art and life” as her “inability to eat and her emotional state transform her artistic voice in the process.”

The festival closes on Sunday, April 3 from 4-6pm with another screening of Artist, and then Alice Neel (82 minutes), an award-winning documentary about this great 20th century portrait painter and Moore alum, “a pioneer among women artists,” directed by her grandson, Andrew Neel. The film follows her life as an artist and Depression-era single mother, until her death in 1984, building on interviews with surviving family members, friends, and art historians.

All the screenings will take place at Moore College of Art and Design, on 20th Street and the Parkway, Philadelphia. Attendance is free, but seats should be reserved in advance. For more information, including the full schedule, speakers, film trailers, and links to reserve tickets, visit the festival online.