Biography:

Alexis Krasilovsky

After studying film history at Yale University, Alexis Krasilovsky embarked on a career as an independent filmmaker and holographer. She later received an MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts.

Krasilovsky was the first to include the film techniques of zooming and dissolving in a motion picture hologram, Created and Consumed by Light (1975). Her pro-choice hologram, Childbirth Dream, was exhibited at the Georges Pompidou Center and other museums and festivals here and abroad.

As head of her own production company - Rafael Film, LLC - Krasilovsky has written, directed and produced numerous documentaries, video-poems and art films, including End of the World, Exile, What Memphis Needs and Blood. Her global documentary feature, Women Behind the Camera (and the shorter version, Shooting Women - both at http://womenbehindthecamera.com, won five Best Documentary awards, as well as a Tribute Award “for achievement in independent cinema” from the San Francisco Women’s Film Festival and a lifetime achievement award from the Gdansk DocFilm Festival. (http://womenbehindthecamera.com)

Meeting other filmmakers at festivals around the world that have screened her work compelled Krasilovsky to think transnationally and transculturally addressing the perils and pleasures of pastry in Pastriology (2013) and Let Them Eat Cake (2014) with the help of co-producers and unit producers from Bangladesh, France, India, Japan, Mexico, Peru, the Republic of Guinea, Turkey and other countries. (http://letthemeatcakefilm.com )

Alexis Krasilovsky is the author of the book Great Adaptations: Screenwriting and Global Storytelling (Routledge: NY/London, October 2017), and is Professor Emerita in the Department of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Northridge, where she has taught film production, screenwriting and media theory and criticism.

Krasilovsky is a member of the Alliance of Women Directors, the International Documentary Association, Women in Film, and the Writers Guild of America/west.

Video Interview: "Showcasing Yale women in film, who fought for legitimacy on two fronts"
- news.yale.edu/2019/09/18/showcasing-yale-women-film-who-fought-legitimacy-two-fronts"

'DIRECTED BY YALE WOMEN: A CELEBRATION OF WOMEN FILMMAKERS AT YALE'

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Alexis Krasilovsky Yale Filmmakers

A message from Alexis Krasilovsky

The world has changed considerably since I embarked on my first global documentary feature, Women Behind the Camera. While screening that film - and the shorter version, Shooting Women - at dozens of festivals around the world -- in Bangladesh, Canada, France, India, Mexico, Poland, Sweden, Turkey and the U.S. -- I met many wonderful filmmakers who inspired me to make a second global documentary.

Working transculturally and transnationally on Let Them Eat Cake with Co-Producers Sanjoy Ghosh (India), Hamidou Soumah, Ph.D. (US/France/Republic of Guinea) and Unit Directors including Rosa Carrillo (Mexico), Shabnam Ferdousi (Bangladesh), Moussa Kemoko Diakité (Republic of Guinea), Christopher Garambullo (New Mexico), Christian Lanazca (Peru), Ajit Nag (India) and others on this complex film about the world hunger crisis makes me hopeful that what we have to say together can inspire change.

Women Behind the Camera and Shooting Women won five Best Documentary awards; I was also honored to received a Tribute Award at the San Francisco Women’s Film Festival “for achievements in independent cinema,” and a lifetime achievement award at the Gdansk DocFilm Festival. The book, Shooting Women: Behind the Camera, Around the World, by Harriet Margolis, Alexis Krasilovsky, and Julia Stein, (Intellect Press: London, 2015) is available at intellectbooks.com.

Let Them Eat Cake screenings to date include: the Paris Independent Film Festival (where it won Best Documentary Feature); the Dhaka International Film Festival (Bangladesh); the Ethnografilm Festival (Paris, France); the Filmmor Film Festival (Istanbul, Turkey); the International Documentary & Short Film Festival of Kerala (India); Festival de Cine de Todos Santos (Mexico); High Falls Film Festival (New York); the Museum of Ethnography (Geneva, Switzerland); Female Eye Film Festival (Toronto, Canada); La Femme International Film Festival (Beverly Hills, California); and the Sole Luna Film Festival (where it won Special Jury Mention for "Best Editing"). The film is now available on Amazon Video Prime.

In the meantime, I’ve released several of my previously-released independent films and videos on DVD: End of the Art World (featuring Andy Warhol and Bob Rauschenberg), Beale Street (where Martin Luther King, Jr. marched before his assassination), Exile, Blood, and Some Women Writers Kill Themselves - a DVD collection of my cinépoems and poetry. Canyon Cinema also offers some of my work on-line via Kanopy.

More recently, I've written the book Great Adaptations: Screenwriting and Global Storytelling (Routledge: NY/London, October 2017) and a novel entitled Sex and the Cyborg Goddess (under the pseudonym Alexis Rafael), which tackles sexual liberation and sexual assault on a college campus, and sexual harassment in the film industry.

I hope you’ll take a look at my work and let me know what you think.