Archivally absent? Female filmmakers in the IFI Irish Film Archive

This paper is an initial exploration of women’s contribution to collections of the IFI Irish Film Archive, specifically in the area of amateur film production. It considers two female-created collections in this sphere of practice, the Currivan and Overend Collections, examining the context in which they were created as well as the nature of the films themselves. This article also examines the reasons why women are underrepresented in film production, specifically the extent to which organisational policies and the gendered nature of leadership and employment effect what material is produced and preserved. It concludes by looking at praxis within the IFI Irish Film Archive collections and asking what measures the Irish Film Institute can adopt to improve women’s representation and visibility in its programmes of exhibition and preservation.

The Double Day of Valeria Sarmiento

Though sometimes rightly hailed as one of Latin America’s most important women directors, Valeria Sarmiento is more frequently referred to as the wife (now widow) and closest collaborator of Raúl Ruiz. Since Ruiz’s death in 2011, she has been completing his unfinished films. At the same time, she continues directing her own projects. This essay unpacks her unique creative partnership—working as an editor for her husband while simultaneously striving to direct her own work—as a “double day,” a concept that serves to interrogate the multiple (often unrecognized) tasks demanded of female filmmakers in relation to modes of production developed outside the boundaries of the nation-state, at the interstices of European and Latin American film and television industries. The article examines the interconnections between the gendered division of labor in filmmaking and the precarious mobilities that result from exile.

New Blood in Contemporary Cinema

Since the new millennium, a growing number of female filmmakers have appropriated horror aesthetics for their films. In this book Patricia Pisters investigates contemporary women directors such as Ngozi Onwurah, Claire Denis, Lucile Hadžihalilović and Ana Lily Amirpour, who put ‘a poetics of horror’ to new use in their work. In this way they expand the range of perspectives relating to gendered as well as racialized themes of the horror genre. Exploring such themes as rage, trauma, sexuality, family ties and politics New Blood in Contemporary Cinema takes avenging women, bloody vampires, lustful witches, scary mothers, terrifying offspring and female Frankensteins. By following a red trail of blood, the book illuminates a new generation of women directors who have turned the camera inward to reveal mental landscapes of pain and sorrow that translates in a poetics and aesthetics of horror, thus enlarging the general scope and stretch the emotional spectrum of the genre.

Women in the animation industry in Spain: the oeuvre of female filmmakers of feature films

<p>En la industria del cine español, únicamente tres mujeres han dirigido largometrajes de animación. Su obra, condensada en las últimas tres décadas, representa un siete por ciento de la producción total de los más de cien años de historia del medio. En este trabajo analizamos el trabajo de Maite Ruiz de Austri —pionera en el sector—, Virginia Curiá y Agurtzane Intxaurraga con el objetivo de identificar los elementos de confluencia en el total de ocho películas largas que forman parte del corpus. En primer lugar, se ha observado una tendencia a dirigirse a una audiencia infantil, con una clara vertiente educativa. Asimismo, se ha podido constatar cómo emergen rasgos comunes en torno a temáticas como la maternidad, la vida profesional, la corresponsabilidad o la condición de la mujer. Este artículo está encaminado a visibilizar el trabajo de las directoras españolas de largometraje y a explorar la influencia del género sobre el contenido.</p>

The Other Sex of Polish Cinema. The Contribution of Female Filmmakers to Feature Film Production in the People’s Republic of Poland

The paper is dedicated to the Polish female filmmakers – contributors to feature film production from the period 1945–1989 in the Polish state film industry. The theoretical framework is based on women’s studies and production studies. Author presents and comments on the numbers from the quantitative research, including credits of feature films production, divided into key positions: director, scriptwriter, cinematographer, music, editor, production manager, set designer and assistant director, costume designer. The results are presented in graphics and commented in 5 years blocs. The analysis leads to the conclusions describing the specificity of emancipation in socialist Poland in the area of creative work.

Documentary Film, Gender, and Activism in China: A Conversation with Ai Xiaoming

FQ board member and contributor Chris Berry translates a conversation between the independent female filmmakers Ai Xiaoming and Zeng Jinyan. Although of different generations, Xiaoming and Zeng are both outliers in China's male-dominated film industry. The most prominent women filmmaker among the first generation of independent documentarians, Ai Xiaoming has lived under virtual house arrest since Xi Jinping's rise to power in 2012. Zeng Jinyan came to public attention in 2006, when she documented the disappearance of her husband, civil rights activist Hu Jia, in a protest blog; she later completed a PhD on the work of Ai Xiaoming while in exile in Hong Kong. Both women have recently reentered public life, Ai Xiaoming writing about her experiences of the novel coronavirus lockdown in her hometown of Wuhan and Zeng releasing a new film, Hanjiao yu eryu (Outcry and Whisper), focusing on the special pressures placed on women who dare to speak out in public in China.