Academic literature on the topic 'Women and Arts Festival'

Lucas Martinelli reports from the 34th edition of Argentina's Mar del Plata International Film Festival, the only FIAPF-accredited film festival in Latin America. Noting that this year's festival marked the sophomore effort of Cecilia Barrionuevo, the first female director in the festival's history, Martinelli focuses attention on the notable uptick in discussion space and festival slots awarded to women in the industry. The festival's second Forum of Cinema and Gender Perspective brought female speakers from fields across the industry—actresses, directors, researchers, and journalists. In his discussion of films directed by women, Martinelli notes an interest in challenging the historical archive to create a new feminist historiography.

The Hindu festival of Taipucam celebrated in honour of the male god Murugan is one of the public festivals that Hindus in Singapore celebrate with a great deal of aplomb and ceremony. It takes on the hue of a carnival and is a major tourist attraction. At the centre of the festival is the male kavadi bearer. Beside him walks the docile woman carrying her pot of milk. In the Taipucam festival procession, there is clearly apparent an empowered male versus a subsidiary female space, which appears determinate and confined, marking a tentative emergence of a subversive ‘feminist’ space that attempts to grasp at a measure of empowerment for women.

The Melbourne Women in Film Festival (MWFF) is a four-day event in Melbourne, Australia, that supports and celebrates the work of Australian women filmmakers. Launched in 2017, the festival emerged from our desire as screen academics to increase the visibility of both professional and amateur women filmmakers and their work. Despite a strong history of grassroots and state-supported women’s creative cultures in Australia, women have remained marginal within the domestic screen industry. Women filmmakers are also underrepresented within the global festival circuit. This article traces the curatorial practices underpinning MWFF since its inception. We describe our approach to running a locally based, women-centered film festival; how we define “women” and “women’s filmmaking”; and how our programing choices support our festival ethos. We also contextualize our event as one that both continues and is in dialogue with women’s screen culture in Australia, particularly the one-off Women’s International Film Festival held in 1975. Locating our festival in this historical context, we argue that retrospective screenings play a particularly vital role at MWFF in achieving our festival aims. We recount our inaugural festival in 2017 and explain the significance of retrospectives in building a legacy for women filmmakers and making their achievements visible to the next generation.

In 1976, a remarkable group of Black feminist artists organized the first ever Black women’s film festival, the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts, at the Women’s Interart Center in New York. Screening films by at least sixteen Black women directors, the festival was simultaneously a celebration of the emerging world of Black women’s filmmaking and a radical call for the kinds of socio-political and institutional changes necessary for a Black women’s film culture to thrive. This essay uses archival materials and personal interviews to reconstruct the festival, arguing that although it has long been overlooked, it represents a foundational moment for Black feminist film culture and epitomizes the cross-arts networks of influence that shaped Black feminist artmaking in the period. At the same time, engaging with a fragmentary archive, the essay reflects on the forms of speculation needed to reconstruct the events, lived experiences, and long-term legacies of the festival.

FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich presents her take on festival-going in the time of COVID. While noting the challenges posed by geoblocking and navigating festival schedules across multiple time zones, along with the absence of the excitement and comradeship that provide live festivals with their momentum, she observes that virtual festivals—liberated from geography—offer advantages in terms of access. Surveying the offerings at the Toronto Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and DOK Leipzig, Rich highlights feature films and documentaries that offered a welcome escape from her COVID-demarcated existence, from critical favorites such as Nomadland (dir. Chloe Zhao, 2020 ) and Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” anthology series, to discoveries such as Hong Sang-soo’s Domangchin yeoja (The Woman Who Ran, 2020) and En route pour le milliard (Downstream to Kinshasa, 2020), by the young Congolese documentarian Dieudo Hamadi.

How valuable is youth artistry in Toronto theatrical productions? How important is including diverse and under-represented youths at cornerstone theatre festivals like SummerWorks? What are the barriers to youth theatre? In our article, we explore these questions by examining the AMY (Artists Mentoring Youth) Project, which seeks to provide accessible performing arts training and creation programs to women and non-binary youth from equity-seeking communities. In addition to examining the relationship the mentors of the program have with the participants, we look at how vital youth representation is at SummerWorks. The AMY Project works to break down barriers that are often felt by youths in performing arts, and, as a result, young people produce socially engaging work that is well received and necessary to the festival and the Toronto theatre community.

By happy coincidence, Mexico in 2016 yielded two expert and moving documentaries on women, sex, and aging: María José Cuevas's Bellas de noche (Beauties of the Night) and Maya Goded's Plaza de la Soledad (Solitude Square). Both are first-time features by female directors. And both are attempts to reclaim previously neglected subjects: showgirls of the 1970s and sex workers in their seventies, respectively. Moreover, lengthy production processes in which the filmmakers cohabitated with their subjects have resulted in films that are clearly love letters to their protagonists. Widely shown at festivals and beyond, Bellas de noche won best documentary at Morelia, Mexico's key festival for the genre, and was picked up by Netflix in the United States and other territories. Plaza de la Soledad, meanwhile, earned plaudits at Sundance and a theatrical release in its home country in May 2017, a rare opportunity for a documentary. Complex and contradictory, these twin films celebrate women whose lives may be limited by circumstances cruelly beyond their control but who are vital, still, in their quest for friendship and freedom.

Since its inception at the Bath Film Festival 2014, the ‘F-Rating’ has been adopted as a yardstick to foster equitable representation of women in film. The rise of a new sub-genre of Hindi ‘Indie’ cinema (Devasundaram, 2016, 2018) has been augmented by an array of bona fide Female-rated independent films. These films fulfil the triune criteria for F-Rating, featuring women both behind and in front of the camera – as directors, actors and scriptwriters. I argue that these distinct female voices in new independent Hindi cinema have engendered discursive filmic spaces of resistance – alternative articulations that transgress India’s patriarchal national master narrative. Indian cinema thus far has been presided over by Bollywood’s hegemonic bastion of male-dominated discourses. The mainstream industry continues to propagate gender-based wage disparity and hypersexualised representations of the female body via the serialised song and dance spectacle of the ‘item number’. The increasing presence of F-Rated Hindi films on the international film festival circuit and through wider releases, gestures towards these films’ melding of the global and local. Drawing on my curation work with the UK Asian Film Festival (UKAFF) and discursive analyses of seminal F-Rated films, this essay highlights the pivotal role played by F-Rated Hindi Indie films in opening up transdiscursive dimensions and creating national and global conversations around issues of gender inequities in India.

Deborah Warner is one of the most exciting of the generation of directors who emerged during the 'eighties – incidentally claiming for women a natural entrance into a profession previously dominated by men. In 1980 she formed the Kick Theatre Company, with whom over the following, formative years of her career she directed The Good Person of Szechwan, The Tempest, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Coriolanus, and Woyzeck. In 1988, following a production for the RSC of Titus Andronicus in the previous year, she became one of the company's resident directors, staging King John and Electra before moving in 1990 as an associate director to the National, where her first two productions were of The Good Person with Fiona Shaw and King Lear with Brian Cox. During the 'nineties, she has extended both the nature and the range of her work, directing Shaw in Hedda Gabler in Dublin, Coriolanus in German at the Salzburg Festival, Don Giovanni at Glyndbourne – and, in 1994–95, the season she discusses below, a revival of Beckett's Footfalls at the Garrick, controversially banned by the Beckett Estate, a dramatization of Eliot's seminal inter-war poem The Waste Land, premiered in Brussels, Richard II at the Cottesloe, with a woman, Fiona Shaw, in the title-role, and a project for the London International Festival of Theatre site-specific to the old railway hotel at St. Pancras. In September 1995 she discussed her recent and future work with Geraldine Cousin, who teaches Theatre Studies in the University of Warwick, where she has just completed a study of contemporary plays by women entitled Women in Dramatic Place and Time.