USA 1970 | Director: Stephanie Rothman | Script: Stephanie Rothman, Don Spencer, Charles S. Swartz | Camera: Stevan Larner | Editor: Stephen Judson | Sound: Sunshine Meyer | Music: Clancy B. Grass III | Production: New World Pictures | Colour | 35 mm | 85 min | english OV | Academy Film Archive

The box office success of Stephanie Rothman's THE STUDENT NURSES, shot in 1970 for Roger Corman's newly-established production company New World Pictures, was the starting signal for a whole series of "nurse films". But no one could hold a candle to Rothman in terms of feminist subversion of the exploitation genre. Sex and violence, yes, but in a story that revolves around four very different young women who live together in a shared flat in L.A. Their everyday lives are permeated by the social upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s: women's liberation, the fight against police violence and racism, resistance to the Vietnam War. Right in the film's opening sequence, an attempted rape leads to a discussion about violence in conventional medicine; an abortion is performed collectively among friends; and a documentary-like street theatre scene by Mexican women activists (Teatro Popular) sets the politicisation of one of the student nurses in motion. With obvious enthusiasm, Rothman experiments with cinematic forms, staging love-ins and LSD trips. The title song by Clancy B. Grass III encapsulates the optimism of the time: "We can make it!" – and the chorus responds, "If we're all in". (Gaby Babić, 2023)