Festival founder Laura Petrie, a western Kentucky native, started Cinema Systers in 2016, the year after the beloved Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival ended its four-decade run. Its organizers, Petrie recalled, handed out acorns and challenged attendees to plant their own creative seeds at home and create spaces to showcase women’s voices.
Her little acorn, of course, became Cinema Systers.
“I think the patriarchy has done some damage to our society, and so I wanted to uplift the visions and the voices of my sisterhood, because I know how incredible they are, how talented they are, and they needed somebody to give them a voice and a public space to show their art,” Petrie said.
A decade on, Petrie’s festival has grown into a multifaceted four-day gathering filled with screenings, filmmaking workshops, slam poetry, live music and other programs.
Petrie said lesbians are “starving for [their] own stories” and that Cinema Systers offers a cinematic smorgasbord to the filmmakers and attendees it draws from around the world.
“It's very comforting and wonderful to sit in a dark theater and hear the women as they laugh together,” she said. “They get the jokes. They sigh together and cry together because they're finally seeing their own stories on the big screen, finally.”
Nearly two dozen films screened at Paducah’s Yeiser Art Center and the city’s independent arthouse theater Maiden Alley Cinema as part of this year’s slate, all of them directed by women who identify as lesbians. Among them were documentaries about the longest running lesbian bar in Ohio and “Saturday Night Live” alum Punkie Johnson; meditations on memory, poetry and artificial intelligence; and genre shorts with names like “Clam Diving for Beginners” and “Mona’s North Beach Noir.”
Jennifer Trujillo is a Washington, D.C.-based filmmaker who also serves as the senior managing director for the Gilbert Baker Film Festival, which centers LGBTQIA+ productions in honor of the designer of the original Pride flag.
Trujillo fell in love with the “beyond electric, dynamic” atmosphere of Cinema Systers last year, after attending to promote a short film she had produced.
“Our voices are not the leading voices that you hear. We don't get amplified enough. We don't get a chance enough, and Cinema Systers cares about celebrating women-led films,” she said. “There are so many stories untold about us, and then also just stories. We're part of the rich fabric of life, and we deserve to be represented across the fabric of life, across all genres of film, and we're not.”
The 10th anniversary also featured a screening of Georgia-based filmmaker B. Danielle Watkins’ documentary "Parallel" — which captures her experience as the only Black attendee of the first Cinema Systers. Though she wasn’t able to attend in person this year, Watkins said she missed it fiercely.
“I never would have thought Paducah, Kentucky, felt like home, but it did,” Watkins said.
Many festival attendees return year after year not only to see the films, but to see each other.
Daphne Redd makes the trek from Clarksville, Tennessee, every year because of the way it makes her feel.
“When you're in marginalized communities, having a community where you can just be yourself is liberating. It makes you feel like, ‘God, I'm finally home. I don't have to hide myself,’” Redd said.
Some might doubt how welcoming the seat of a county that Trump carried by more than 30 points could be for a gathering like Cinema Systers, but Redd said Paducah — one of just nine UNESCO Creative Cities in the U.S. — has been nothing but sweet to her.
“Paducah: Most people can't pronounce it, much less [know] where it's at on the map, but it's actually a cool little community,” Redd said between screenings at MAC.
Trujillo, too, said she was hesitant about coming when she first heard the festival was in Kentucky but felt welcome the moment she arrived.
“I didn't know what was going to happen. I was definitely judgy in my head, I admit it,” she said. “Then I got here, and it's welcoming, the town is welcoming. The community is really excited that the festival injects money into the community and the local economy.”
In addition to screenings, Cinema Systers has traditionally included workshops that help give attendees the tools and skills to tell their own stories.
Gina Dabrowski, a Minnesota artist and educator, taught dozens of women how to direct one-shot films using their phones. She said just giving people the basic skills to tell their stories can be a powerful thing.
“It gives them a voice, puts them in charge, so that they are the ones controlling the narrative,” Dabrowski said. “I want women to have the power in their hands to make videos that they want to share with whomever they choose.”
Chrissy Mahan said Cinema Systers inviting her to teach a workshop on accessibility speaks to the attitude of the annual gathering.
“The cost and the technology are now no barrier to everyone being able to make a film,” she said. “Festivals that celebrate and also create space for people who are living their lives in the way that makes sense for them … I feel that that's a revolutionary position. This festival is thinking about trans-inclusive, gender-expansive women, and I think that those voices — now and into the future, if things keep going the way they are — will need to have one, and hopefully more, homes.”
Edie Eberhardt — a western Kentucky filmmaker whose debut short “The Cat Sitter” premiered at Cinema Systers last year — was originally inspired to get into film by attending workshops like these in previous years. She credits the festival with inspiring her and her girlfriend, Jeri Hernandez, to make art together.
“It really plants seeds, and the community here is so loving and so encouraging that it's hard to not succeed,” Eberhardt said. “We just all really inspire one another, and I don't even have to know these women, but we make eye contact when they walk in the door, they see the lanyard and we're like, ‘I know you.’ And just everybody's smiling at each other, because this is such a magic weekend.”
Eberhardt and Hernandez even started a studio together called High Grass Hideout. Their second short — “A Haunting On Dyke Road” — screened this year.
“I always get really pretty sad when the festival ends, because there's so much positive energy, that I know I've got to wait a whole year,” Eberhardt said. “I'm getting teary-eyed just thinking about it, but it's a very moving weekend.”
Marie Cartier, a California-based author and activist who’s come to nearly every Cinema Systers, taught a screenwriting transitions workshop at the festival this year. For her, the particular magic that film wields is in the shared “silver screen dream” it creates for the people sitting together in the dark.
“We don't really get to do it in the same way anywhere else,” Cartier said. “Seeing movies in a theater together allows us to all have that dream, and I think one of the things that Cinema Systers does is create a collective dream for us.”
As Cinema Systers wrapped up on Sunday, Petrie announced she was stepping down as organizer, with plans to turn the festival over to a group of volunteers and advocates who want to keep it going for the next decade and beyond.
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU Public Radio in Kentucky, and NPR. Sign up for the weekly Porch Light newsletter here for news from around the region.
