A Place of Rage: Women and Anger on Screen

“Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being.”—Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” Sister Outsider

Post-#MeToo, films and television — many by women — have redefined female anger not as pathology or threat but as, in Lorde’s words, “loaded with information and energy.” Inspired by the work of scholar and UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Professor Kathleen McHugh, this series explores how women’s rage, long silenced, has been and is being reclaimed through feminist filmmaking, challenging familiar tropes and reframing women’s anger as purposeful.

Titled after Pratibha Parmar’s A Place of Rage (screening November 14), the series examines anger as a site of clarity, resistance and transformation and considers how genres once hostile to female subjectivity have become platforms for feminist disruption. This collection of shorts, television episodes and narrative and documentary features serves as a visual conjuring of the uses of anger: when wielded with precision, on women’s own terms, our rage can move beyond catharsis to radical change.

Series programmed and notes written by UCLA Professor Kathleen McHugh and Public Programmer Beandrea July