‘My Name Is Andrea’: Dworkin’s roar lives on

Above: Andrea Riseborough is one of five actresses who appears in "My Name Is Andrea." (Photo/Film Collaborative)

There are as many ways to do a film biography as there are important people to film. And to many people involved in the feminist movement, Andrea Dworkin would be one.

Dworkin, who died in 2005 at the age of 58, wrote nine nonfiction books, two novels and a short story collection. But she is most known for her work analyzing pornography.

“Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men,” she wrote in her book “Intercourse.” (T)his is the essential truth of pornography.”

Dworkin is the subject of the film “My Name Is Andrea,” which will screen one night only at 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Magic Lantern Theatre. This showing of the film, which written and directed by Pratibha Parmar, is sponsored by the San Francisco-based Alliance for Media Arts + Culture.In honor of International Women’s Day, a poetry reading will follow the film.

In the Hollywood Reporter, critic Sheri Linden wrote, “With their quiet ferocity and recognizable predicaments, the dramatic vignettes in ‘My Name Is Andrea’ find the Everywoman in a singular figure, and the film as a whole connects Dworkin’s concerns about class and race and gender to the present moment.”

In the New Yorker, critic Richard Brody wrote, "Augmenting Dworkin’s voice with a selection of her texts read and re-enacted by Ashley Judd, Soko, Amandla Stenberg, Andrea Riseborough, and Christine Lahti, Parmar reveals Dworkin’s work to be fundamentally literary as well as political; the movie’s portrait of Dworkin is briskly sketched but deeply moving."