The disappearance of Shere Hite

The Disappearance of Shere Hite

Screening International Women's Day Eve
with pre-screening performance from MaCapella and
Saturday screening includes performance from the
Felicity Cripps Band
Thursday 7th March 2024, 7:30pm
& Saturday 9th March, 1:30pm
Theatre Royal, Castlemaine

Shere Hite’s 1976 groundbreaking study of the intimate experiences of women, The Hite Report, remains one of the bestselling books of all time. The book challenged restrictive conceptions of sex and opened a dialogue in popular culture around women’s pleasure. But few remember Shere Hite today. What led to her erasure?

The Hite Report’s charismatic author, Shere Hite, a feminist sex researcher and former model, became the public messenger of women’s secret confessions and she engaged television titans in unforgettably explicit debates about sexuality – while suffering the backlash her controversial findings provoked.

Digging into exclusive archives, as well as Hite’s personal journals and the original survey responses, filmmaker Nicole Newnham (Crip Camp, 2021 Best Feature Documentary Oscar® Nominee, Audience Award Winner: U.S. Documentary, 2020 Sundance Film Festival) transports viewers back to a time of great societal transformation around sexuality. Her revelatory portrait is a rediscovery of a pioneer who has had an unmistakable influence on current conversations about gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy, as well as a timely, cautionary tale of what too often happens to women who dare speak out.

This special International Womens Day Screening is proudly co-presented with Theatre Royal

CREDITS

Director
Nicole Newnham

Producers
Nicole Newnham, Kimberley Ferdinando, Trevor Smith, Molly O’Brien, RJ Cutler, Elise Pearlstein

IFC Films, UNITED STATES 2023

118 minutes

Filmmaker

Nicole Newnham

Nicole Newnham is an Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning documentary producer and director, four-time Sundance Film Festival alumnus and six-time Emmy nominee.

She co-directed and produced the 2021 Academy Award-nominated documentary CRIP CAMP with Jim LeBrecht. The film won the Sundance Audience Award, the IDA Best Feature Documentary Award, the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature, and most recently, a Peabody.

Nicole has produced two virtual reality films with artist/director Lynette Wallworth that have each won an Emmy for Outstanding New Approaches to Documentary: the breakthrough VR work COLLISIONS (2017) and AWAVENA (2019). Both films premiered at Sundance New Frontiers and were featured in installation form at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Nicole’s other acclaimed documentaries include, the Emmy-nominated films THE REVOLUTIONARY OPTIMISTS, SENTENCED HOME and THE RAPE OF EUROPA. Recently, she co-directed this year’s landmark ESPN series about the history of Title IX, 37 WORDS with acclaimed filmmaker Dawn Porter.

A graduate of Oberlin College and Stanford University’s documentary film graduate program, Nicole lives in Berkeley, CA with her husband, Tom Malarkey, and sons Finn and Blaine.