What do filmmakers as disparate as Kevin Smith, Ed Burns, Rob Epstein, and Barbara Hammer have in common? A secret weapon known as Bob Hawk. As a veteran of the American independent film scene since its inception, the cinephile and consultant has been a regular, cherished presence at film festivals and markets for over three decades. Hawk saw promise in scrappy, independently produced films like Clerks and The Brothers McMullen when no one else even knew to look, and he brought these films to the attention of the Sundance Film Festival, thereby launching multiple careers in the process. An unsung champion of new voices, he has discovered innovative work, nurtured new talents, and brokered relationships with film festivals and critics alike, while staying out of the spotlight—until now. At 75, Bob Hawk looks back on a still-vibrant life in independent film, exploring how the rebellious gay son of a preacher found his calling as a behind-the-scenes film impresario.

Childhood stories of the artist as a young lesbian and intimate tales of the lesbian as a young artist underscore the filmmaker's life of performances. With a Swiss army knife she robs an American Express Bank in Morocco, accosts a shepherd in a field on International Women's Day, and tap dances on Shirley Temple's star on Hollywood Boulevard. This child movie star was the ideal by which Hammer's ambitious mother measured her own Barbie. Grandma, already a cook for Lillian Gish in Hollywood, introduced the cute, loquacious child and her mother to D.W. Griffith. Lesbian autobiography is a slender genre, so Hammer draws from general culture studies for critique and to provide an ironic edge to the synthesized "voices of authority".

Hammer’s 2003 film Resisting Paradise, which deals with the concept of art as a tool of political resistance, was especially fascinating to me. Hammer, who was doing a painting residency in Cassis, France, when war broke out in Kosovo, found herself questioning the validity of art in the face of political conflict and unrest. She began exploring the history of the French Resistance in Cassis, and used that as a chance to reflect on how Cassis’ artistic community, both those who were threatened by the Nazi occupation of France and those who were able to remain relatively neutral, reacted to the atrocities of the Second World War.

An archive-driven exploration of the life, work, and legacy of iconic, pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer.

Welcome To This House, a feature documentary film on the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop, is about life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full lesbian disclosure. Hammer filmed in Bishop's best loved homes in the U.S., Canada, and Brazil, believing that buildings and landscapes bear cultural memories. Interviews with poets, friends,and scholars provide missing documents of numerous female lovers. Bishop's intimate poems and the creative music composition by Joan La Barbara bring the poet into our lives with new facts and unexpected details.

Barbara Hammer’s Audience (1981) is a fascinating deep cut from the director’s prodigious filmography. Relatively raw in its design, this 16mm diary of audience reactions at retrospectives of Hammer’s work in San Francisco, London, Toronto, and Montreal in the early 1980s bears none of the distinctive visual flourishes and essayistic form one usually finds in her filmmaking.

The Female Closet uses archival photographs, home movies, interviews, and other visual materials to explore the closeted lesbian stories of artists Alice Austen, Hannah Höch and Nicole Eisenman. Utilizing groundbreaking research, newly discovered home movies, and archival photographs, and other visual sources, The Female Closet is a cultural interrogation of the closeted and not-so-closeted lives of three women artists.

Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic.