A Film About the Most Important Female Director You've Never Heard of.

*** JUST ADDED!  A bonus short film by Alice Guy-Blaché preceding the movie.***

Pamela B. Green’s Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy - Blaché , narrated by Jodie Foster, is a feature documentary that rewrites film history, revealing for the first time the full scope of the life and work of cinema’s first female director, screenwriter, producer, and studio owner Alice Guy - Blaché.

SYNOPSIS:

Narrated by Jodie Foster, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché is a documentary about the first female filmmaker, Alice Guy-Blaché, which explores the heights of fame and financial success she achieved before she was shut out from the very industry she helped create.

Over the span of her career, she wrote, produced or directed 1,000 films, including 150 with synchronized sound during the ‘silent’ era. Her work includes comedies, westerns and dramas, as well as films with groundbreaking subject matter such as child abuse, immigration, Planned Parenthood, and female empowerment. She also etched a place in history by making the earliest known surviving narrative film with an all-black cast.

Green has dedicated more than eight years of research in order to discover the real story of Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968) – not only highlighting her pioneering contributions to the birth of cinema but also her acclaim as a creative force and entrepreneur in the earliest years of movie-making. Green interviewed Patty Jenkins, Diablo Cody, Ben Kingsley, Geena Davis, Ava DuVernay, Michel Hazanavicius, and Julie Delpy - to name a few--who comment on Guy-Blache’s innovations. Green discovered rare footage of televised interviews and long archived audio interviews which can be heard for the first time in Be Natural, which affords Alice Guy-Blaché to tell her own story.

"FALLING LEAVES" BONUS SHORT FILM!

Be Natural will be preceded by a rare big screen presentation of one of Alice Guy-Blaché's groundbreaking short films, Falling Leaves (1912). The plot of Falling Leaves owes elements to the O. Henry short story "The Last Leaf" (1907). The child hero is a recurring theme in Guy-Blaché films. When Falling Leaves was made in early 1912, Solax still was operating out of the Flushing studio it rented from Gaumont. The sets were designed by Henri Ménessier, who had worked with Guy-Blaché since 1904. All the primary roles were filled by members of the Solax stock company. The review in The New York Dramatic Mirror commented on the cast's capability and complimented the production as "developed and played with a compelling naturalness". In a similar vein, Moving Picture News said of the film that the story unfolded "in an atmosphere of delicacy and charming naturalness". A 35mm print of Falling Leaves is in the collection of the Library of Congress, transferred there in 1983 from the Library and Archives Canada where it was part of the Jerome House collection.

"Thank goodness "Be Natural" is here to set a brilliant, distinguished, invaluable record straight."
-Washington Post

"A scrupulously well-researched documentary about one of early cinema's greatest pioneers and the world's first woman filmmaker."
-Hollywood Reporter