Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival Conference: how anthropology could inform artists14/3/2023 Very honoured to have had the opportunity to talk about the making of my film 'Because Goddess is Never Enough' last week at the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival Conference. I was inspired by Tilly Losch and her creative life because she is pushed and pulled by all these men, she suffers miscarriages, and a mental breakdown, but she keeps on going, doing her own thing at a time when the barriers to doing that as a woman were extremely difficult, and she continues a creative life after dance by turning to painting. As the film stands, as a feminist viewpoint on the credibility of creative women in the 1920s to 40s, the extent to which we have progressed in the last 100 years and the distance we still have to go to have equality, I think it is largely successful. The film was a personal response to the material, through an oblique telling of a story of a now largely side-lined woman. But there was so much in the source material that I did not really know how to navigate… Throughout my research I was aware that I was interested in, but avoided deeply interrogating underlying social and cultural aspects of my subject. I think a visual / media anthropologist could have given me the insight I was missing. My presentation was a discussion around the questions raised by the material I researched.
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So pleased and delighted to announce that Because Goddess is Never Enough recently won Best Videoart at the recent VII Bienal Internacional Dona I Cinema festival in Valencia Spain. A particular pleasure at this festival which champions the work of women in film - because my aim with my film was to look at how far creative women have come in the 90 years since my inspiration, Tilly Losch, was in her heyday, and yet how far we still need to go to have equal opportunity and credibility. Events like this festival are invaluable to give exposure and experience to talented women with some amazing films to share.
Thank you!!! Looking forward to joining Lucy English and Helen Dewbery for the first of their new online series of events ‘Poetry Film in Conversation’. The events kick off on Thursday 9 February at 19.30 (GMT) with Animation, Motion Graphics and Text on Screen. I'm going to be talking about text and typography :) Diek Grobler, Suzie Hanna and I will each give a presentation (Suzie’s will be pre-recorded) followed by a panel discussion chaired by Lucy, and finishing up with an audience Q&A. Tickets available through Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/poetry-film-in-conversation-animation-motion-graphics-and-text-on-screen-tickets-516766210647 Diek Grobler is an artist working in various media and disciplines. Since 2010 his creative and theoretical focus has been on animated poetry-film. His films have been widely exhibited on international animation festivals, and his work has been shortlisted twice for the Weimar Poetry-film Award. He was awarded a PhD in Art from the University of South Africa and is an independent researcher on Poetry-film and experimental forms of animation.
Suzie Hanna is Emerita Professor of Animation at Norwich University of the Arts. She was Chair of NAHEMI, the National Association for Higher Education in the Moving Image from 2016 – 2019, and remains an honorary member of the executive. As an animator who collaborates with other academics and artists, her research interests include animation, poetry, puppetry and sound design. She has made numerous short films all of which have been selected for international festival screenings, TV broadcast or exhibited in curated shows. She also creates improvised animated projections for live performances of music and poetry. Recent commissions include short films for BBC Ideas and Cambridge University Creative Encounters Programme. She contributes to journals, books and conferences, and has led several innovative projects including online international student collaborations and digital exhibitions of art and poetry on what was Europe’s largest public HiDef screen. She works as a production consultant and as an international academic examiner, and she was a member of the AHRC Peer Review College from 2009-2014. Very happy to say that Because Goddess is Never Enough will be part of the upcoming Dona i Cinema biennial festival in Valencia in Spain, showing on the first day of the screening programme on 30th January. The festival seeks "to give visibility to artistic productions by women, given their absence in all areas of the film industry, from artistic creation to distribution".
Sunderland Shorts is a great festival to be part of - I was very pleased that Because Goddess is Never Enough was part of the experimental screening. Very well supported and organised, this quick review gives a flavour of the festival.
Thank you Sunderland! In June, I was fortunate to hear a presentation by Toby Martinez de las Rivas at the Poetry & Image Symposium held at the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) and hosted by Reading University and Oxford Brookes University. Toby was talking about his work while he was spending six-months as a Writer-in-Residence at MERL. I was very intrigued by what he was doing with layering text, but equally quite worried about his use of MS Word to do it. I could see so much exciting potential in where Toby is heading but a Word document is an inevitable technical dead-end for reproduction in any other format or media. So we started to talk and hit it off ... we got each other pretty excited about what we might do together.
It's a leap into the dark for us both because Toby is generously giving me free rein to experiment and explore what I can do with his material without a defined outcome. I have his poems that were written as responses to MERL's Eric Guy Collection, soundtracks that Toby developed with musician Neda Mirova, and the original Eric Guy photographs held by MERL. Eric Guy was a photographer who documented rural life and agriculture in central southern England from the 1920s to the 1950s. MERL has a collection of over 2000 glass plates. It became a tantalising wait until MERL could digitise the relevant glass plates and supply me with high resolution files. But now I have the images, I've dipped my toe straight in and am getting excited by where we might be heading. Oh ... and I haven't even mentioned that many of the photographs we are working with feature horses - what a bonus :)
Earls Court International Film Festival from 11-18 November 2022 in London, and Because Goddess is Never Enough will be in the online programme.
Hugely exciting to take part in Zebra Poetry Film Festival last week in Berlin (6-10 November). Because Goddess is Never Enough was screened in the Feminist Voices programme. I watched a range of the other programmes on offer, as well as competition films and the Maya Deren restrospective.
The Feminist Film Festival in Bucharest, Romania is aiming to "create spaces and contexts for dialogue and to keep fighting for gender equality". The festival is taking place 13-16 October.
The organisers argue we still need feminism in 2022: "We continue to organize this festival because we want to explore the issues that both women and men face in patriarchal societies through a selection of films that address topics such as human rights, gender equality & gender-based violence, migration, gender roles , identity and intersectionality." I am proud that they have selected Because Goddess is Never Enough. It will show on Saturday 14th at 16:30 in the programme 'Invisible Women'. |
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