Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women will have its BOSTON PREMIERE screenings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
www.mfa.org or call 617-369-3306

Filmmakers Nancy Porter and Harriet Reisen will be present at the screenings along with other special guests.

Wed., Sept. 17th, at 8pm
Museum of Fine Arts Premiere

Sat., Sept. 20th, at 12:30pm*
Louisa and Bronson Alcott – The Father/Daughter Bond
John Matteson, 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and her Father. Professor, John Jay College, SUNY.

Sun., Sept. 21, at 10:30am*

Fri., Sept. 26th, at 5:00 pm*
Making Historical Documentaries
co-sponsored by Filmmakers Collaborative, Center for Independent Documentary and Women in Film & Video/New England

Sat., Sept. 27th, at 10:30am*
Louisa Alcott’s Influence on Women’s Lives and Literature
Megan Marshall, author, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, Pulitzer Prize Finalist 2006. Assistant Professor, Emerson College.
Beverly Lyon Clark, co-editor Little Women and the Feminist Imagination, author Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America. Professor, Wheaton College.
Gail Mazur, author 5 books of poetry; winner, 2006 Massachusetts Book Award for Zeppo’s First Wife: New & Selected Poems; finalist 2001 National Book Award; fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study 2008-2009.

Sat., Oct. 11th, at 10:30 am*

Sat, Oct. 18th, 4:00 pm
Filming in Historic Houses
Jan Turnquist, Director, Orchard House Museum
Maud Ayson & Laurie Butters, Director and Curator, Fruitlands Museum

* reduced ticket price

Producer/Director: Nancy Porter
Producer/Writer: Harriet Reisen

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women is a 90-minute documentary about one of New England’s most notable literary figures, the author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott.

The film, a co-production of Nancy Porter Productions and Thirteen/WNET’s American Masters, explores the surprisingly complex, dramatic and compelling life of Alcott, a world-renowned personality whose true story has never before been told on film. Best known as the author of wholesome stories for young people, Alcott was also the pseudonymous author of pulp fiction thrillers featuring exotic characters doing things no Victorian lady was supposed to know about – for instance, smoking opium and hashish. Alcott’s secret authorial identity was not discovered for more than a half-century after her death, and even now is little known beyond academia.

The documentary weaves a variety of elements — on-camera interviews with scholars, dramatizations shot in historic locations, feature film clips, archival illustrations, contemporary animations, photographs and footage — into a complex, dramatic portrait of this “gutsy, down-to-earth, powerfully driven” independent woman. The true story of Alcott is an eyewitness account of the Transcendentalist era, the Civil War, and the Gilded Age, that is full of startling discoveries and significance for our times.

Project Co-Directors Nancy Porter and Harriet Reisen received full production funding, beginning with a major grant from The National Endowment for the Humanities. Subsequent sources were WNET, PBS/CPB, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and The Simons Foundation.

The film was the Grand Award Winner at the Providence Film Festival and is scheduled for national PBS broadcast on American Masters in 2009.