Barbara Hirschfeld

Barbara Hirschfeld studied filmmaking in 1974 with a bunch of rebel filmmakers under the mentorship of Ray Foery, a professor at Dartmouth at the time, who demonstrated what the medium of film could do. Some of the great avant garde filmmakers, Bruce Baillie and Stan Brakhage, presented at their modest theatre "The Shadow Box" in Hanover, NH. For her film Transformations, Hirschfeld practiced with Super 8mm before she used 16mm. It was entirely filmed in the fields and woods and homes around the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont. Hirschfeld took over a year to edit the film at the Frei Akademie der Kunst in The Hague. There were very few women filmmakers at the time and she ended up being hired by Dutch TV to film the first international women’s conference in Brussels where no male camera men were allowed. Barbara continued her pursuit of creativity through filmmaking, working on documentaries of the Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament and other political events like the Ribbon project. She helped begin the local Public TV station KRCB in Northern California where she moved in 1982. More recently she teaches meditation and is a student of Pema Chodron, and she runs a retreat center which encourages the contemplative life. The core group of women who made this film in 1975, including the writer and director (Barbara), the camera woman, Beth Dingman, and the composer, Julia Haines, and some of the actors, remain a close community of women to this day, continuing our life-long commitment to feminism. After the making of this film, some of the women who participated created a theatre group, The New Cadre Players, which toured New England. Beth Dingman and her partner Claudia McKay, created New Victoria Publishers, a women's publishing company that became nationally known as one of the first feminist publishing houses active from 1975-2007. Julia Haines, who created the brilliant sound track for the film, has become a nationally known composer and musician. She will present her signature composition , "Thunder Perfect Mind”, a setting of an ancient poem from the Nag Hammadi Library, at the World Story Telling Conference in 2022. Parrish Dobson, who played a key role in forming the film, taught Women's Studies and English Literature at various colleges and private schools, and has become a well known fine art photographer.