Trailblazing women get spotlight at Sundance

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jane Fonda and Gloria Allred were all born within eight years of one another — 1933, 1937 and 1941. While their trajectories couldn’t be more different, they’re also similar in some ways.

Each went on to defy expectations of their time and become powerhouse representatives of women, and all are getting the spotlight this year in three films playing at the Sundance Film Festival.

Ginsburg soldiered through sexist obstacles, like the Dean of Harvard Law School asking “How do you justify taking a spot from a qualified man?’’ to become the second female Supreme Court Justice in history. Allred devoted her energy to the often thankless task of taking on powerful men like Bill Cosby and Donald Trump (and more recently Harvey Weinstein) on behalf of powerless women. And Fonda eschewed a life of comforts as the beautiful daughter of Hollywood royalty to become a self-actualized activist.

Director Susan Lacy’s “Jane Fonda in Five Acts,’’ an HBO Films production that will air sometime this year, is an unflinching account of Fonda’s life told through archive footage and new interviews with Fonda, who reflects on everything from her mother’s suicide and her eating disorder to the Hanoi Jane infamy and historymaking workout videotape with heart-wrenching (and warming) candour and insight.

It is the story of, as she says at age 80 and in the beginning of her last act, becoming a “fully realized Jane’’ separate from a man, whether it’s her various husbands (“none of my marriages were democratic,’’ she said), or the shadow of Henry Fonda, who was quite distant as a father but took the time to call her fat when she was growing up.