Fronza Woods

Fannie's Film is a 1981 documentary short that follows 65-year old Fannie Drayton, a cleaning woman. The film is told from the perspective of Drayton and is 15 minutes in duration. Hugues Perrot writes: "In parallel with the hieratic figures that come and go on the sports machines, she is filmed alone cleaning the studio emptied of its ghosts. The film upends paradigms, plunging the visible world into a bare space and giving body to an inaudible voice – a voice that is especially moving as it recounts the joyfulness of the life it has led." Fannie's Film was selected for the 1985 Créteil International Women's Film Festival. Woods comments: "I like films about real people. I am inspired by almost everything but especially by struggle. I am interested in people who take on a challenge, no matter how great or small, and come to terms with it. What inspires me are people who don't sit on life's rump but have the courage, energy, and audacity not only to grab it by the horns, but to steer it as well." With Fannie's Film, Woods' saw the short as an opportunity to filmically express her own anger about inequality and "benign" racism. Woods, of the film, said "I really did want people to think about the "invisible" people who make their lives more livable. I wanted to make a film that showed that those people have rich lives and people that love them, too. They, too, dream. They, too, can be funny and insightful. But you'll never know it if you don't engage with them, if you pretend they don't exist. In hindsight, it sounds embarrassingly 'worthy!

Woods is one of the first black woman directors that completed multiple short films. In 2017, BAM Cinematheque in New York City included both Killing Time and Fannie's Film in a new season. This proved to be the start of a contemporary "re-discovery" of Woods's work. Woods describes receiving the news in 2017 that her films were to be featured, nearly thirty-five years after they were produced: "It was very strange, not to say a bit destabilizing. Suddenly... I was catapulted forward, backward and sideways in time. I was an artist, and I use that word loosely, who had never really been discovered — I'm speaking solely of critics and the media, the people who have the power to make or break one's career — yet was now being re-discovered." Richard Brody called Killing Time "very simply, one of the best short films that I've ever seen." Melissa Anderson of the Village Voice praised Woods's film Fannie's Film: "she makes the mundane facts of Drayton's life indelible." Hyperallergic writes that Woods gives otherwise invisible women like Drayton a platform and calls the documentary "extraordinary." The New York Times wrote that Woods "humorously yet movingly contemplates existence" in Killing Time. In 2019, Killing Time and Fannie's Film were screened at a film festival of the Institut Jean Vigo at the Cinémathèque de Perpignan in France. That same year, both films were featured at the Courtisane Film Festival in Ghent, Belgium, as part of the series "Breaking Sacred Ground: African-American Independent Filmmaking on the US East Coast, 1967-1989. In November 2019, Woods' films were featured during the 41st edition of the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes, France. In June, 2021, Killing Time and Fannie’s Film were screened by Royal Cine Cineclube in Lisbon. In an essay published online in June 2021, Woods humorously reflects on her time as a filmmaker and the late recognition of her work: "When I was a confused, ambitious, younger woman embarking on my filmmaking career, I went to a psychic who I was hoping would tell me "one day you're going to be a famous filmmaker." Alas, there was no mention of filmmaking, let alone fame, I had to content myself with "yours will not be just any old name in the phone book." At the time I was disappointed, not to say terribly disappointed with his lackluster prediction. As it turns out, he was right, and now I'm thinking this late recognition is good enough for me. 19,979,520 feet from stardom is not such a bad place to be."