Heroines without a cinematic universe: Sheroes at the 17th TAURON AFF
One thing you won’t see at AFF is superhero movies. Heroines, on the other hand? Absolutely. For decades, America only listened to women once they stopped playing nice. Billie Jean King had to beat a man in front of the entire country before anyone bothered to calculate what women tennis players were earning. E. Jean Carroll had to win two lawsuits against Donald Trump before casting doubt on her account began to carry a price. The youngest heroines in this selection aren’t afforded even that much space. Meet the S-heroes.
Since 2010, we’ve been showing America from every perspective—including those long absent from the front pages. Nothing is better suited to that task than documentary cinema. Documentaries have long been an important pillar of our program, and the 17th TAURON American Film Festival will be no exception. This year, alongside our flagship documentary sections, we’re also spotlighting smaller thematic groupings. The first is Sheroes—the name speaks for itself.
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Give Me the Ball!, dir. Liz Garbus, Elizabeth Wolff, USA 2026, 101'
Billie Jean King needs no introduction to tennis fans: a 39-time Grand Slam champion, a Federation Cup winner, an advocate for women’s sports, and a charismatic, uncompromising figure. But directors Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff, both seasoned documentary filmmakers, have no interest in producing a dull, reverential biography. From its opening minutes, they frame their portrait of the legendary athlete around a larger question: just how deeply does politics run through sports? The film becomes a collective portrait of women—in tennis and beyond—of the discrimination they face and their fight for equal treatment, particularly equal pay. Much like Cristina Costantini in Sally (executive-produced by Garbus), the filmmakers examine the tentacles of patriarchy: the territory it has claimed and the ways women are forced to play by its rules for fear of losing their social standing and hard-won success. This layered approach lends Give Me the Ball! real bite. As electrifying as its protagonist, the film becomes a manifesto for unfettered freedom without ever turning didactic.
Agnieszka Pilacińska, translated by Barbara Feliga
Ask E. Jean, dir. Ivy Meeropol, USA 2025, 91'
Some of you may have already seen this film—it screened at this year’s Millennium Docs Against Gravity, and for a documentary, an MDAG selection is a seal of quality in itself. Those who saw it there know that this is about more than a court case. E. Jean Carroll started out as Miss Cheerleader USA and appeared as such on the game show To Tell the Truth. Her career later took a very different turn: she broke barriers as one of the first women to hold editorial roles at Esquire, Playboy, and Outside, and wrote an advice column for Elle for a quarter of a century. In 2019, she described what had happened to her in a fitting room at a New York department store in the 1990s. She went on to prevail in two civil trials against Donald Trump: one found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation, while the other awarded damages for separate defamatory statements he had made after she first went public with her account. Ivy Meeropol—the granddaughter of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953—knows a thing or two about people hated by half the country, and makes no pretense of neutrality toward her subject. The deposition footage speaks volumes: less than a year separates the two recordings, yet Carroll appears to have aged a decade.
Ask E. Jean, dir. Ivy Meeropol
Miss Representation: Rise Up, dir. Jennifer Siebel Newsom, USA 2026, 86'
Since 2019, Jennifer Siebel Newsom has been California’s First Partner rather than its First Lady—a title she chose when her husband, Gavin Newsom, took office as governor. Her films likewise ask who gets to define women. In 2011’s Miss Representation, she examined how media portrayals of women shape their access to power. Fifteen years later, she returns to the same question and finds an America in which more women than ever hold positions of power, even as the online forces working to dislodge them grow stronger. Hillary Clinton, Katie Couric, and Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen all appear on camera, but Newsom listens most closely to high school girls. The youngest generation becomes a litmus test for the country’s social climate—and attitudes change far more slowly than the statistics. The girls themselves put it most succinctly: “You can’t feel both threatened and empowered at the same time.”
Miss Representation: Rise Up, dir. Jennifer Siebel Newsom
The 17th TAURON American Film Festival will take place November 17–22, 2026, at New Horizons Cinema in Wrocław. The online edition will be available on the New Horizons VOD platform from November 17 to December 6. Passes and accreditations are on sale through October 31. We’ll announce the full program on November 3, and individual tickets will go on sale November 5.
Destination: All States of Cinema
