Jan Andrews grew up in Alpine, Utah, and studied anthropology and epidemology at the University of Utah, before transitioning into film. After returning from Egypt, where she was doing research for her PhD, she decided to pursue a career in filmmaking. She now holds an M.A. in Anthropology and an M.F.A. in Film Studies. Andrews is a creator of experimental films and documentaries. Her films were screened all over the world, such as the Sundance Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival, and many others, and they have won awards including Best of Show, Director's Choice, and are in the collection of Anthology Film Archives in NYC. Andrews also served as a member of the Board of Trustees at Salt Lake Art Center (presently Utah Museum of Contemporary Art), a member of the Board of Directors for Utah Film Center, and collaborated on creative projects with the Utah Symphony.
The Jan Andrews independent film collection (1984-2010) consists of seven 16mm and four DVDs experimental and documentary films by Utah filmmaker Jan Andrews. Includes films related to anthropology, mental health, Native Americans, and other themes. This collection is part of the Utah Independent Film Archive (UIFA).
Material is arranged alphabetically by format.
Audio-visual materials can be fragile and require specialized equipment to play back. For this reason, access to audio-visual materials is provided through digital copies, and it might take longer to provide access to items that are not yet digitized. Access to parts of this collection may be restricted under provisions of state or federal law, condition of the material, or by donor.
Processed by Jimi Jones in 2004 and Danielle Rausch in 2025.
Donated by Jan Andrews in 2003-2012.
Forms part of the
Collection Name, Collection Number, Item Number. Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, The University of Utah.
The library does not claim to control copyright for all materials in the collection. An individual depicted in a reproduction has privacy rights as outlined in Title 45 CFR, part 46 (Protection of Human Subjects). For further information, please review the J. Willard Marriott Library's
This experimental documentary is a meditation on the vandalism of Anasazi sites and artifacts in Southern Utah.
Screenings and awards:
Finalist, Anthropos '87 Film Festival Los Angeles
Finalist, San Francisco Film Festival, Golden Gate
Finalist, Utah Short Film & Video Festival,
Women One World Film Festival, New York
Canyonlands Film Festival
International Student Film Festival
Learning Channel: Focus on Native American series
This documentary about the 1955 termination of Utah's Southern Paiute Tribe both as a tribe and as a recipient of benefits from all federal programs. After a struggle to survive, the group fought successfully for restoration as a tribe and to federal monies in 1980. This is a film about those events and their effect upon the tribe.
Screenings and awards:
Margaret Mead Film Festival, New York
Native American Film Festival (traveling festival)
Canyonlands Film Festival
Community Access Television (Utah, Ohio, Pennsylvania)
Funded in part. by a grant from the Utah Humanities Council.
A short documentary about necessary lifestyle adjustments when a group of people is transplanted from one culture to another. Andrews uses scenes of Asian families in Utah as they perform various rituals, from marriage and death ceremonies to organized classes that help children maintain an understanding of their parent's traditions and language to a farming commune to religious celebrations. Exiles was made over a two-year period with support from the Utah Endowment for the Humanities, the Utah Media Arts Center, and the University of Utah.
This experimental film is a meditation on the influence of landscape, literature, painting, poetry, music and film on the filmmaker's life.
Screenings and awards:
Ann Arbor Film Festival, Honorable Mention
Utah Film & Video Festival: Best of Show
Black Maria Film Festival, Director's Citation
Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah
San Francisco International Film Festival
Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany
Athens International Film Festival, Athens, Ohio
Mix '94, New York Experimental Film Festival
Brazil '94 Film Festival (5 cities)
NY Expo of Short Film and Video
Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Image et Nation Festival
Florida Film Festival, Miami
Central Florida Film Festival, Orlando
Sydney Film Festival, Sydney, Australia
Boston Experimental Film Festival
Funded by a grant from the Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowship (with the National Endowment of the Arts and the American Film Institute).
This experimental documentary is a meditation on amnesia and schizophrenia which explores the injured brain and how it reacts to memory and loss of memory.
Screenings and awards:
Utah Short Film & Video Festival: Best Experimental Film
Sundance Screenwriter's Lab
Canyonlands Film Feseival
Dance on Film Festival, New York
Festival of Films on Disabilities
This experimental documentary based on Aristophanes' Ancient Greek play
Screenings and awards:
Women Make Movies, New York City
Experimental Film Festival, New York City
Festival of Experimental Films, London, Great Britain
Canyonlands Film Festival
Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany
Funded in part by a grant from the American Film Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts.
This experimental documentary presents a cross/cultural view of women and adornment.
Screenings and awards:
Special Merit, Utah Short Film & Video Festival
Artists in Residence Gallery, New York City
Films Charas, New York City
Canyonlands Film Festival
New York Experimental Film Festival
This film was produced at the University of Utah.
"This documentary portrait explores the passionate spirit of Joseph Brodsky who defied all barriers to become one of the most interesting contemporary Russian poets of the 20th century. Interviews with scholars and friends of Brodsky trace his experience as the last Russian writer arrested by the KGB. He underwent a Kafkaesque trial and was exiled to Siberia. In 1972 he was exiled from his homeland and in 1987 won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Recordings of Brodsky reading his poems are the background of visual motifs and themes that have defined Brodsky as a resident of three "water cities": Leningrad, New York and Venice. His stance on poetry was heroic. He defended formal poetry rather than the free verse then popular in America. Every winter he traveled to Venice, a city that reminded him of his beloved St. Petersburg, and here he wrote the book called Watermark (Quay of the Incurables). He died in New York City in 1996 but was re-buried in Venice on the island of St. Michele. Co-production: Shibui Productions SLC and Studio AC Venezia Italy."
"Twenty Years ago, five Jewish families in Park City organized to begin a Jewish congragation and Hebrew school. The congregation grew and they hired a permanent Rabbi and began plans for building a Synagogue. This film is the story of that journey and the resulting building that now stands as a monument to persistence and desire."
This documentary explores the physical and cultural effects of lightning strikes and electrocution:
Lightning contributes annually to more death and injury that any other weather related phenomenon. Interestingly, 70% of victims survive the strike. Gretel Ehrlich explored the metaphors of electricity after surviving a lightning strike in her book A Match to the Heart. In language that surpasses the mere experience of being struck, she takes us into the strange world of weather and electrical phenomenon, dreams, exploration of the body under siege, cross cultural views of lightning and the philosophy of Tibetan Buddhism.
Gretel's story provides the "heart and soul" of this film. However, the film also explores how the dynamics of lightning and the conservation of electrical energy mediate her experience and the roll it plays, for good and ill, in all of our lives. For example, lightning caused the chemicals and compounds of the primordial soup to synthesize into amino acids, the basic building blocks of all organic life, and begin life on earth. It brings nitrogen rich rain, and causes fire which naturally "manages" the forests of the earth. Electricity is the force that runs our bodies and can be as beneficent as the electrical charge between God and Adam's fingers on the Sistine Chapel ceiling or it can send the body into seizure and early death. Electricity, tamed, gives us light and, in the form of medical implements, can diagnose and, in some cases, cure disease. The film also looks at the Dr. Frankenstein aspect of electricity, a creature charged to life by electrical currents roaming freely across the landscape. Electricity is also used to control or change behavior (electroshock treatment, aversion therapy) or to end life in the form of electrocutions.
"The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was enacted on November 16, 1990, to address the rights of lineal descendants, Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations to Native American cultural items, including human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. In Utah, the Act has been applied as written but with the involvement of the Native Tribes some considerations have been made for the continuing study of the burial objects, including human remains, before they are reburied. In interviews with Native Americans and Archeologists, the complex issue of who owns the past is explored."