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On Sunday at 7 PM, Doc Films will present a program of works by Chick Strand (1931 – 2009), one of the country’s greatest female filmmakers. Strand earned her degree in ethnography in the 1960s while organizing avant-garde film screenings in the San Francisco area; she was also instrumental in the founding of Canyon Cinema, the long-running experimental film distribution company. Strand’s work marks a stunning combination of ethnography and avant-garde filmmaking. She shot some of her most memorable films on trips to Mexico and South America; those works, which include Mosori Monika (1969) and Anselmo and the Women (1986), convey such a profound sense of discovery that they blur the line between documentary and experimental cinema. (One can sense their influence in the recent work of Ben Russell and Ben Rivers.)
