Sex Researcher Shere Hite Returns To Cultural Prominence, And The Oscar Race

deadline.com:

The groundwork was laid for Nicole Newnham’s Oscar-contending documentary The Disappearance of Shere Hite back when the director was just a girl. “I was 12 years old when I discovered The Hite Report in my mother’s nightstand drawer,” the filmmaker has written, “sneaking it to read for myself, to learn about the world of female sexuality, a world that remained cloaked in shame and mystery for me as for so many others.” For a time, The Hite Report: A National Study of Female Sexuality could be found in nightstand drawers or displayed less surreptitiously on bookstore shelves and in library stacks across the country, its author a fixture on talk shows and top of mind in the zeitgeist.

Interest in her work was by no means limited to the U.S.: Hite’s study was translated into more than a dozen languages. Newnham got a sense of interest in Hite abroad when she took her film recently to the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam.

It screened in the Best of Fests section, reserved for documentaries IDFA considers the best of the year. “I really didn’t know how a European audience would respond,” Newnham told us in Amsterdam, “especially given that so much of the story in our film is about the American cultural reaction to Shere Hite’s findings.

But it was fascinating.” Newnham added, “Many women my age and younger came up to me and said they had read The Hite Report as young women, and actually men too… I think that there has not been the sense of forgetting and maybe even that kind of puritanical shame that sometimes Americans have around discussions of sexuality, which I think plays a role in the disappearance of Shere Hite, why she disappeared.