The Women’s Experience

Last year, the women’s unit of Canada’s National Film Board celebrated its 15th anniversary by choosing 16 women from dozens of applicants to make films reflecting “what was on their minds and in their hearts.” The results, assembled as the near-two-hour “Five Feminist Minutes,” will be presented by Filmforum at 8 tonight at LACE.

Virtually every aspect of the female experience is illuminated; every one of the 16 films is pertinent politically if not aesthetically, and several of the films are standouts. Among the most venturesome and effective are Lorna Boschman and Kim Blain’s painful but discreet “Family Secrets,” a stylized recollection of a childhood experience with incest; Sook-Yin Lee’s wry, amusing “Escapades of the One Particular Mr. Noodle,” an account of growing up a first-generation Chinese-Canadian in the ‘60s; Janice Cole’s “Shaggie,” which tells, through remarkable letters, of the fate of a young woman incarcerated from the age of 13, and Gwendolyn’s “Prowling by Night,” in which a group of Toronto prostitutes crusade for safe sex. Information: (213) 663-9568.