World Premiere Sundance Film Festival 2023

The Hite Report, a groundbreaking study of the intimate experiences of women, remains one of the bestselling books of all time since its publication in 1976. Drawn from anonymous survey responses, the book challenged restrictive conceptions of sex and opened a dialogue in popular culture around women’s pleasure. Its charismatic author, Shere Hite, a feminist sex researcher and former model, became the public messenger of women’s secret confessions. With each subsequent bestseller, she engaged television titans in unforgettably explicit debates about sexuality while suffering the backlash her controversial findings provoked. But few remember Shere Hite today. What led to her erasure?

Digging into exclusive archives, as well as Hite’s personal journals and the original survey responses, filmmaker Nicole Newnham (Crip Camp, Audience Award: U.S. Documentary, 2020 Sundance Film Festival) transports viewers back to a time of great societal transformation around sexuality. Her revelatory portrait is a rediscovery of a pioneer who has had an unmistakable influence on current conversations about gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy, as well as a timely, cautionary tale of what too often happens to women who dare speak out.

REVIEWS:

Variety - ‘The Disappearance of Shere Hite’ Review: Nicole Newnham’s Gripping, Revelatory Doc Rediscovers a Forgotten Feminist Icon

“Billy, feel free to stop sniggering,” says a 1976 TV interviewer crisply to the cameraman whose audible titters after Hite’s use of the word “thrusting” have ruined the take. Hite, a former model with a gorgeous cloud of strawberry blonde hair and a highly covetable sense of style, had a casual, soft-spoken way of deploying words like “clitoris,” “penetration” and “masturbation” that, back then, seemed to make everyone uncomfortable but her. Suddenly, a cut reveals that the interview is actually playing on a monitor during a different TV show from 1994, and Hite is smiling ruefully at her younger self. It’s an example of editor Eileen Meyer’s imaginative cutting style that extends to the sound design: Dreamily overlapping fragments of Hite’s writing, melodically narrated by Dakota Johnson, interlock with Lisbeth Scott’s score and the piano concertos and disco cuts on the soundtrack. Where other archive-reliant bio-docs can feel purely functional in form, “Crip Camp” director Newnham crafts “Disappearance” like carefully stitched embroidery.