Summer Heat

Follows the story of Sarah, who comes under fire from her family, friends and colleagues when she marries an African man, Maas. When she discovers that Maas is part of an underground group of South African freedom fighters, she must analyze her own political and sexual beliefs.

Made jointly by the Women’s Film Workshop and some of the inmates of the California Institution for Women, this is a moving analysis of why the women are in prison, what’s happening to them, what’s to become of them. It begins and ends with film taken outside the walls, while the rest is videotape transferred to film of the prisoners talking about race, sex and religion, class, economics and drugs. Occasionally statistics are inserted, but generally the women show such a degree of articulacy and radical thought that what they have to say is explanation enough. A remarkably undated combination of political anger and collective tenderness.