FilmWatch Weekly: 'Over the Kitchen Table,' 'Fackham Hall,' '100 Nights of Hero,' and more * Oregon ArtsWatch

"Her mother, Norma Burton, was a key figure in the origin of what was then called the "battered women's movement" in 1970s Tulsa, Oklahoma. From a kernel of community, women talking with women in each other's homes, grew a grassroots organization that founded some of the first shelters for victims of domestic violence and later became the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, all the while facing backlash that included violence and death threats from a patriarchal society reflexively protecting its own privilege."

"like many conservative communities, the city had "a very intersectional counterculture of people from the LGBTQIA community and the BIPOC community. Tulsa's also where the [1921] Tulsa race massacre happened. The legacy of that was very much alive then, making Tulsa an incredibly segregated place. They made a conscious decision to place the first shelter in the black part of town to show that this space was not just for white women, that it was to protect everybody.""

Director Nisha Burton made a 21-minute short, Over the Kitchen Table, featuring her mother, Norma Burton, a founder of the 1970s battered-women's movement in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Women met in each other's homes, forming a grassroots organization that opened some of the first shelters for domestic-violence survivors and later evolved into the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Founders faced violent backlash and death threats. The film recreates early kitchen-table conversations as Norma recalls a period when women could be legally barred from mortgages or credit cards and when marital rape was legally treated differently. Tulsa's segregated history and local intersectional activism shaped shelter placement and services.

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