By the time director Katja Raganelli arrived in California to make a film about Dorothy Arzner in 1980, Arzner had passed away in a car accident. Nonetheless, Raganelli visited Arzner’s desert home and retraced the pioneering filmmaker’s career in this documentary, using Arzner’s trove of photographs, as well as interviews with her leading lady Esther Ralston, to create this nuanced portrait of a woman who bucked every norm and defied societal expectation.

Dorothy Arzner was Hollywood's most powerful director, though History has forgotten her. She began working in the film industry at 19 as a "cutter" before the advent of editors, and gradually worked her way up through the studio system. Determined and ambitious, she was accepted as a director at Paramount, as the first woman to direct a talking picture for the star Clara Bow. A true pioneer of the cinema, she was the only woman director at a major Hollywood studio in the 1930s and 1940s, openly lesbian, dressed like a man, making movies "avant-gardiste" about women's condition. She was a mentor for Francis Ford Coppola, who considers her as one of the most important woman directors of Hollywood.