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You'll Never Work Alone: Celebrating the Feminist Film Collective

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

No booking required

This one-day interdisciplinary public screening and symposium celebrates Cinenova, a volunteer-run, non-profit collective preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. The event showcases the work of Cinenova in the area of archiving and preservation, as well as their mission to keep a feminist film historiography alive and relevant, for contemporary audiences. It also inaugurates a broader collaborative project with Birkbeck, which will explore experimental feminist filmmaking practices, the histories of feminist collectives, and the essayistic.

The symposium will debate the essayistic as an aesthetic and socio-political formal strategy of collective feminist filmmaking practice, and as a means to give representation to women’s lives, both at work and in history. In so doing, the event will also discuss the role of Cinenova as an archive of such work, and the issues involved in curating and circulating it, for a feminist film historiography in particular, and for film culture in general.

To focus our conversation, the symposium will look in depth at two emblematic feminist filmmaking collectives forging essayistic and experimental film and video-making practices, often against the odds, and in distinct national settings. The first is Grupo Cine Mujer, a Colombian feminist collective (1970s-1990s), which aimed to speak for women in cinema through working with the very language of film; and the second is WiTch (Women's IndependenT Cinema House), a collective based in Liverpool that supported the scripting, editing and distribution of films by women.

Details of programme – speakers, panels, films – to be confirmed.

This event is co-sponsored by BIH (Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities), CILAVS (Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies) and BiGS (Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality).

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