The Herricanes were a part of the first women's full tackle football league in the 1970s. Their unknown story is one of commitment, courage, and strength. Despite adversity and hardship, they fielded a team purely for the love of the game. What they started was a movement that is still in motion today.
Today women's football still faces the same struggles endured by The Herricanes 40 years ago. Thanks to Title IX, the amount of girls and women participating in sports has grown exponentially since 1972. However, football remains to be the final frontier for women in sports. Springing off of The Herricanes' story, we explore the greater question: what does it mean when the number one sport in America is only visibly played by men?
Olivia began her career in filmmaking at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where she focused on cinematography and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2006. To date she has shot over 30 narrative features and 5 documentary features. She directed her first scripted film that sold to Lifetime in 2022. And most importantly, for the past several years she has been directing and producing her own documentary project, The Herricanes, which won the audience award at SXSW in 2023. Olivia’s current projects in development include a scripted film about the first woman sportscaster to break the locker room barrier, as well as a documentary centered on one family in the Marshall Islands confronting the nuclear legacy and rising sea levels that plague their homeland. Olivia’s work can be seen at oliviakuan.com.
