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Brilliant cinematographer and photographer Svetlana Cvetko has made her directorial debut with Yours Sincerely, Lois Weber. Produced by Elizabeth Banks, Lois Weber is a sweet, nostalgic look back at a...

Last week Kino Lorber launched a new Kickstarter aimed to fund their latest project “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers,” a collection of important American films directed by women, including Alice Guy Blaché, Lois Weber, Nell Shipman, Dorothy Davenport­, and many more, between 1910 and 1929.

The ambitious project will be presented in association with the Library of Congress and be the largest commercially-released video collection of films by female helmers. It will include HD restorations of both the most important films of the era, as well as lesser-known works, including short films, fragments and isolated chapters of incomplete serials.

“By showcasing the ambitious, inventive films from the golden age of women directors, we can get a sense of what was lost by the marginalization of women to ‘support roles’ within the film industry,” reads the Kickstarter page.

Read More: ‘The Eyeslicer,’ A New Variety Series By and For Indie Filmmakers, Launches Kickstarter Campaign...

Back before it became apparent that movies could be big business and the industry was thusly taken over by men, there were a handful of women with quite a lot of power. Working primarily in the 1910s, Lois Weber is one director considered an equal in powerful and influence to D.W. Griffith, one of the other major directors of early American cinema. Sadly, Weber’s work seems to have been neglected by the canon in a way that Griffith’s hasn’t, and most of her filmography is lost to time. The four features and two shorts that are broadly available reveal a director of great technical skill and strong belief of film as a tool of social awareness.

Suspense (1913)

This thriller about a wife at risk from a vagabond is quite effective in telling the story in just ten minutes. More impressive is the technical display with the use...

By Michael Atkinson

Todd Rohal's "The Guatemalan Handshake" is one of the most inventive, most poetic, most disarmingly authentic indies of the last few years . so, of course, you've never had a chance to see it. It's a movie that seems to have dropped out of the sky, inexplicably, like a satellite fragment landing on Main Street. Naturally, it's not a project constructed around a traditional idea of storytelling propulsion . Rohal has whipped his world from the weedy ground up into a fiery, relentless storm of quirk, but he's original enough in his cataract of details to keep us in a constant state of enchanted disorientation. Why was "Napoleon Dynamite," with its relatively stereotypical uber-misfit, a hit, while this 2006 daydream foundered out of sight?

Set in some Forgottentown, Pennsylvania, "The Guatemalan Handshake" encounters characters undramatically, and its narrative gradually coalesces around them: Donald the triangular-electric-car-driving nebbish (Will Oldham); his...