Su Friedrich - 1979 - Cool Hands, Warm Heart torrent

The film begins with a series of events on a crowded outdoor market street. Women on stages perform “private” rituals: shaving legs and armpits, fixing their hair, etc. A woman tries to disrupt their “work.” She struggles to set herself apart from them, to resist the forces of habit, but gradually becomes more involved than she is willing to admit. Although she sets in motion a chain reaction of rebellion, she isn’t able to keep the momentum going. She stops before carrying it to the logical conclusion, and ends up on the stage herself.

“Building on proverbs, metaphor, and the principles of a radical feminist imagination, Su Friedrich creates a world in which women’s private rituals become public spectacles. Filmed in super-8 on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side, Cool Hands, Warm Heart works through questions of danger, attraction, violence, and ultimately the transformative power of bonding between women. Friedrich is able to draw on her training in avant-garde cinema as well as her background as a street photographer. In this work, she combines the two sets of concerns into an unusually original vision, re-imagining public space as a sort of Cool World inhabited by women of daring.”
—B. Ruby Rich

Festival Screenings and Awards:
SPECIAL MERIT AWARD, Athens Film Festival; New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival; Frameline Film Festival; International Women’s Film Festival, Copenhagen; Feminist Film Conference, New York