What Was She Thinking

This film is part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival screenings in JCCSF’s Kanbar Hall.

Documentarian Iris Zaki is an award-winning filmmaker, a vibrant woman in her forties, and confidently unmarried and child-free. In What Was She Thinking, she dives into the endlessly layered decision not to have children, filming intimate conversations with close friends and peers, family members, and women from different generations. The result is a candid and thought-provoking work that will resonate with anyone who has contemplated their own capacity for parenthood.

Zaki’s incisive style drives What Was She Thinking, exploring the cultural pressures and expectations faced by Israeli women, both at home and elsewhere in the world, as well as the impact of war on individuals’ decisions about growing their families. One highlight is her examination of the familiar question, “Who will take care of you when you’re older?” “Non-moms” in their forties interview childless women in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, revealing a wide range of perspectives on motherhood, caregiving, and the roles women occupy within society. —Laura Henneman

Dr. Iris Zaki is a Grierson award-winning artist-filmmaker with a signature cinematic style. Her first-person documentaries explore themes of complex identity, cross-cultural encounters and community representation, Her films Women in Sink and Unsettling have been shown at numerous festivals (incl. CPH:DOX, IDFA, AFI Docs, Karlovy Vary and BFI) and universities worldwide, winning many prestigious international awards. and featured on TV internationally and on the NY Times’ OpDocs, attracting millions of online viewers. Zaki did her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she explored her innovative interviewing technique – the Abandoned Camera, as well as subjectivity and ethics in documentary and ethnographic filmmaking. Iris is teaching documentary filmmaking for BA and MA students at Sapir College in Israel, while also giving masterclasses in Europe and the US.

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