JENNIFER FOX (producer-director, Flying: Confessions Of A Free Woman).

I decided to put myself in my new film, Flying: Confessions Of A Free Woman, because I was tired of being a filmmaker who put other people but never herself on the line. I wanted to talk about female sexuality, which had to start with myself.

So I filmed everything over the last four years — the times I spent with my married lover, my boyfriend, my pregnancies and miscarriages, and so on. Everything. It was a conscious decision to say: this is a modern female life, and I will not hide my sexuality anymore. I will not apologize for it. I will not pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s not that I am trying to be political — I don’t really think of myself as a political person — but for women, owning one’s sexuality is one of the keys to our freedom. And because it is something we are forced to think about and fight for it becomes a political act. I really don’t believe that we can be truly free if our sexuality is imprisoned either through external means or through internal shame and repression.

But then I went one step farther: I hypothesized that there was a “re-thread” between what I had experienced in my life with my sexuality — as a woman living in middle-class America — and with the lives and experiences of women all over the world. I went on the road and spent years collecting stories by “passing the camera” with other women and discussing our sexuality and our predicaments. Comparing myself to other women from diverse classes and cultures is almost more radical than exposing my sex life because now much of the world wants to divide us into groups that don’t relate to each other, and therefore the common root of our suffering is kept hidden and conditional.

It is easy to say, “Oh there are those poor women over there who are subjugated in Pakistan, by their culture, religion, and men, for example, and who are not free. Whereas Western women have privilege and are free.” This is true from a certain angle, however it blinds us to the spectrum of female life and its haunting similarities regardless of culture and class. Our experiences do relate to each other; we can understand each other — and because of this deep connection, we cannot disconnect from sharing each other’s plight.

So I exposed my life and sexuality and connected it to the lives of other women around the world without being politically correct. Now it will all be up on the screen in six short hours to premiere in Sundance. And it feels like jumping off a cliff into the unknown because from one day to the next my invisible life will become visible. I don’t know whether I will explode into a hellish fire or land softly on the ground. I don’t know anything. I only know that it is the biggest risk I have ever taken in my life.