Amei Wallach and Marion Cajori • U.S. • 2008

The life and imagination of an icon of modern art.

As an artist, Louise Bourgeois is best known for her large-scale sculptures, towering arachnids that seem to defy gravity. As a screen presence, she is magnetic, mercurial and emotionally raw. From her time spent in the company of French surrealists to the postwar Modernist era, the French-American sculptress simultaneously synthesized and defied tradition in her artistic exploration of the body, memory, gender, and sexuality. In 1982 she became the first woman to be honored with a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Filmed inside Bourgeois’s Brooklyn studio prior to her death in 2010 at the age of 98, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine engages gracefully and intimately with the artist’s emotional-artistic world. Amei Wallach and Marion Cajori’s documentary premiered at Thessaloniki and the New Zealand International Film Festival.