Sundance Doc ‘The Disappearance Of Shere Hite’ Focuses On Famed Sex Researcher Canceled By Conservatives And Defensive Men

deadline.com:

On September 11, 2020, The New York Times published an obituary for Shere Hite, the renowned sex researcher and author, noting that her work “helped awaken women to their sexual power and advance the Second Wave of feminism.” One of the readers of that obituary was filmmaker Nicole Newnham, and it became the spark that set her on a journey to document a woman who sold almost 50 million books worldwide but who faced such a backlash over her research that it drove her into exile.

The result of that cinematic quest is the film The Disappearance of Shere Hite, which just premiered in U.S. Documentary Competition at the Sundance Film Festival.

For Newnham, the Oscar-nominated director of Crip Camp (co-directed with Jim LeBrecht), the new film amounted to a rediscovery of Hite.

She first became acquainted with the author’s taboo-shattering work, The Hite Report, as an adolescent. “I found it in my mom’s bedside chest where she would stick the books she didn’t necessarily want me to see when I was 12 or 13,” Newnham tells Deadline. “The Hite Report was like a portal into another world, this world of women’s real experiences across a huge spectrum of diversity.” RELATED: Sundance Film Festival: Deadline’s Complete Coverage What made the book so revolutionary when it hit stores in 1976 was its findings and methodology.