On March 12 I saw so many movies about women, I was beside myself with happiness. It was the Voices Film Festival at the Denver Film Center on Colfax. Although the Denver Film Society has been doing Women + Film at the festival for years, it was the first time Voices has had its own festival.
I missed Soul Surfer, about the female surfer whose arm was bitten off by a shark. Take that, James Franco!
My favorite film was Waking Lions, directed by Allison Otto, from which I learned that a Colorado woman, Shannon Galpin, had sold her house to found Mountain2Mountain, which “invests in the world’s most underutilitzed resource: women and girls on the fringe.” The movie portrayed her adventures in Afghanistan.
Galpin has visited women in Afghan prisons (some of whom are victims of rape but were charged with adultery), supported a school for the deaf in Kabul, trained women in midwifery in rural areas (where male doctors are not allowed to see women under any circumstances), ridden her bike in rural areas (many people in Afghanistan consider it obscene for girls and women to ride bikes) because she hopes midwives might be able to travel that way, and has supported education and training in critical thinking for women and girls.
For a long time I had wanted to go to Afghanistan but was under the mistaken impression that you couldn’t just go, that you had to get permission from the military or something. Galpin said no, that there were even people who went as tourists to Afghanistan. That gives me hope that someday I’ll be able to go. I spent so many years of my life following what the Taliban were doing in Afghanistan, when hardly anyone in the United States had heard of the Taliban, that I would like to go there now that it’s safer and see what’s happening.
Mountain2Mountain also contributes to Beyond the 11th’s programs for widows. Beyond the 11th was founded by 2 American women widowed by September 11 who decided to help women in Afghanistan widowed by that country’s 30 years of war. Beyond Belief, the film by Beth Murphy telling the story of their organization, focused much more on the lives of the two American founders but also included emotional footage of their trip to Afghanistan and their relationship with an Italian aid worker who was kidnapped.
The film I was looking forward to most, Pink Saris, was the most disappointing. It may have had something to do with the structure of the film, which was essentially a collection of vignettes. The director, Kim Longinotto, has been directing documentaries since 1982, and that may be her style.
But I think the real problem for me was my disillionment with the founder of the Gulabi Gang, Sampat Pal Devi, whom I had read about and believed to be a defender of women’s rights in rural India. But in this movie, most of her work involved disputes with families abusing their daughters-in-law, and her solution most often was to yell at the family and then send the woman back.
It seems to me she could have spent that energy forming a women’s cooperative and could have used donations to buy a piece of land where these women could live and farm. Perhaps that is completely unrealistic.
There was nothing in the movie about the Gulabi Gang, that is, the group of women who wear the pink saris. They were shown from time to time, but their purpose was not explained.
I hope that you will check out these movies, especially Waking Lions, and attend the gala put on by Mountain2Mountain on April 28 at the Denver Museum of Art. “Streets of Afghanistan: A Cultural Exhibition,” will be showing.
half of it plus the greens and saved the other half for later.
is still in business. All these stores sell unique, locally made products, like these cloth substitutes for sandwich bags (SnackTaxi) from Dragonfly.
only his frustration. Gray pants hung slack below his right knee: the lower part of that leg was gone. A veteran. Perhaps a diabetic. Perhaps a worker injured on the job.
When I arrived Saturday afternoon, I saw people who looked as if they might be homeless and others who didn’t. The three people behind the counter smiled and served food with alacrity. I shared a table with a group of twenty-somethings raving over the pizza with black beans and corn. My own meal, a green salad with carrot-ginger soup, was fresh but not wildly tasty, though the lemon-coated shortbread cookie helped make up for it.
After tromping back west on Colfax, I caught the bus and settled in to read my friend Sybil’s 
She even knew the name of the mysterious red building with construction fencing all around it: the Evans School, named for the same family that lived in the Byers-Evans House. (When she and her husband opened the Native American Trading Company, two sisters were still living in that house. One of them had helped established the Denver Artists’ Club in the 1890s, which eventually became the Denver Art Museum.)
(I was asked not to take pictures of items for sale in the store.) After Kevin left, Robin showed me into the locked section of the store where they keep the most precious items: rugs, photographs by Edward Curtis (two were of Hollywood starlets, the others from his series “The North American Indian”), large pots, a cape (she said it was Apache, I believe), and many other lovely old things.
Bixa
2028 East Colfax,
Denver
303-333-1943
bags and its 
African and American Trading Company
2217 East 21st Avenue
Uptown/City Park West, Denver
303-377-3770 (not a direct line to the store, but you can call to get hours)
so that they can make a living when they’re grown up. The baskets are made by hand from Ilala palm and bark and grasses and natural dyes. Some baskets are woven so tightly they can hold beer. Women do most of the weaving in the Zulu Kingdom, as far as I could tell, but men now weave baskets from telephone wire; the one I saw in the store was bright orange and blue.
