Following up her acclaimed 2019 documentary Romantic Comedy, filmmaker Elizabeth Sankey turns her attention to another genre of cinematic depiction of particular interest to women: the witch. How have witches been characterized and shown across the history of film, television, and culture? How has this representation changed and evolved? And most importantly, what is going on just beneath the surface?

Ushering her own long-standing obsession with movies to the fore, Sankey draws on a wealth of footage spanning the entirety of film history- with clips as far ranging as The Wizard of Oz, Girl, Interrupted and Rosemary’s Baby- to make that point that our shared cultural representation of witches says a lot more about how we view women, motherhood, and mental health. Sankey places her own personal experiences alongside interviews with academics and other women with shared experiences within a larger historical context that relates back to the witch hunts of past centuries and up to the way contemporary cultural norms continue to fail women. Witches functions simultaneously as stirring personal testimony, critical ode to cinephilia, and a vital feminist history lesson.––Cara Cusumano

Elizabeth Sankey