Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) has grown from small seeds planted in Bangalore, India, in August 1984. This was the eve of the international conferences marking the UN Decade for the Advancement of Women. At that time, a nucleus of committed women from several different countries came together to share their experiences with development strategies, policies, theories and research. They questioned the impact of development on poor people, especially women, particularly considering the global economic and political crises of the 1980s. They voiced a sense of urgency regarding the need to advocate alternative development processes that would give principal emphasis to the basic survival needs of the majority of the world’s people. Recognising the commonality and power of the global economic and political processes that set the context for diverse national and regional experiences, and that often constrain the possibilities for alternative strategies and actions, the group brainstormed about what factors were hurting women. They arrived at the identification of regional crises as the peg on which to hang the analysis of women’s situations: Africa’s food crisis, Latin America’s debt, South Asia’s poverty, and the militarisation of the Pacific Islands. With the emergence of a new framework, DAWN was born. This is a film about these challenges and about DAWN’s responses to them, a history of the organisation told by the women who are a part of it.