Talking Tribeca: Let Them Wear Towels

I’ve had the pleasure of screening some feature-length and short selections from this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which took place April 17th-28th.

Let Them Wear Towels
Directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg
About the Film

Tracing recent history is usually a fascinating exercise, and exploring the struggles endured by female journalists covering sports, particularly as related to entering locker rooms. As both a journalism major in college and someone with absolutely no interest in sports, I was pleased to discover a very well-executed and informative film that traces the experiences of female reporters trying to break into the world of sports journalism. Weaving archive footage of the great stories those women missed because they were denied access to the locker rooms in with personal accounts of the uphill battle they waged, whether alone or with the support of their newspapers or fellow journalists, proves an extremely successful strategy for examining this history. It’s a documentary that, in just 50 minutes, chronicles a specified period of time rather than makes an explicit argument for continued change to occur, trumpeting the success that veteran reporters have achieved in past decades in blazing a trail for a profession that is now populated with hundreds of women. Anyone with even a passing interest in journalism, sports, or women’s rights will surely enjoy and appreciate this film.

See it or skip it? See it. It should be airing as part of ESPN’s Nine for IX series this summer.