Culture Club

This may be a virtual thinking space but we’re creating it as a reminder of how we’re always all connected via the vital dialogue art creates. Join in the dialogue. Join us on our femme-tastic trawl through culture. 

This Q&A between Bird’s Eye View’s Melanie Iredale and (via Zoom from Melbourne) The Drover’s Wife writer, director, co-producer and star Leah Purcell (Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri) was recorded at a #ReclaimTheFrame preview screening at Rio Cinema on Mon 9 May 2022.

By Sam McBean. Working Girls invites us to look at sex work not for its difference, but for its similarity to many other kinds of work, and to work more generally under capitalism.

By Christine Molloy. Because the film is a miracle. I found myself seeing myself in the character of Maeve, even more so the second time round. As an Irish woman who came of age in the 80s, this is a very powerful thing. Maeve is the only cinematic version of the young woman I was, growing up in the overwhelmingly oppressive bad old days of holy Catholic 1980s Ireland.

By Anahit Behrooz. Prano Bailey-Bond’s video nasty-inspired horror Censor is about many things. But it is also, utterly and irrefutably, about grief, and the absurdity of seeking or even entertaining closure after life-altering loss.

By Ania Ostrowska.
I’m looking at the robust, although often critically snubbed, genre of feminist activist documentary, as seen in the work of one brilliant Korean documentarian, Kangyu Garam. High-octane feminist emotions guaranteed!

By Selina Robertson.
The idea for our Lesbian Camp: Yes It’s F**cking Political season started with a t-shirt. A blue t-shirt that had on its front a pink imprint of the Rio’s Pumping Iron II: The Women cinema programme flyer from 1986.

By Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle is showing at the Barbican Curve until 29 August 2021. Click here …

By Anna Walsh. Storytelling remains the shining item in Variations. Jacques gives us the roiling material realities of hardship, of people disappointing each other and going down the pub after.

By So Mayer. Travels with Tove is a highly sophisticated version of your favourite queer aunt’s slideshows of her adventures.

By Annette Kuhn. I observed that the all-female audience in the packed auditorium responded gleefully as one, talking back to the characters, cheering on the “goodies”, booing the “baddies”. Everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time.

By Clara Bradbury-Rance. Jamie Babbit’s characters have a habit of wreaking as much as havoc as possible, romantically or otherwise, in the cisheteropatriarchy. This politics is profound but it’s also pink, personal, parodic and it pops.

By Cathy Brennan. What connects these shorts is a preoccupation with the relationship between LGBT individuals and the concept of community. No one can really live without the support of others.

By Jacob Engelberg. Where Sheila McLaughlin’s 1987 lesbian-feminist film She Must Be Seeing Things goes, heated discussions follow. The film doesn’t, however, provide simple answers to the questions of power, gender, desire, and paranoia that it raises. Instead, Seeing Things stays with the tensions and contradictions around these issues, giving form to them in ways that have proven, over time, both alluring and troubling.

By Lucy Howie. Sitting in the Cinenova online archives is the work of lesbian, feminist filmmaker Jacqui Duckworth, whose semi-autobiographical film A Prayer Before Birth (1991) has remained untouched by secondary scholarship. I felt a sense of urgency in writing on Duckworth, whose name I had not encountered before and is one that could so easily disappear from contemporary lesbian feminist collective consciousness.

By Jenn Thompson Rebel Dykes premiered at BFI Flare 2021, and will be distributed in the UK and Ireland by …

By Sara Chambers. Moving deeper into the margins of neglected female writers of this era I discovered I was hooked and actively sought out new names. I’d like to share a selection of titles by those either languishing in obscurity or neglected because they’re seen as old fashioned.

By Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou. During the second lockdown, I started to reread Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot. Looking to Hval’s novel, I wanted to see the beauty in it all, the thread of life holding it all together, the brownish stain of the rotting apple leading us outdoors, into light, into spring, into a reinvigorated and reconstituted sense of self.

By Giulia Rho
Watching these films on the occasion of International Women’s Day I am left hopeful of the connections we are able to draw. We need to cultivate our genealogy, reworking the old in order to create something new, much like Sachs and Stratman do in their collaboration with Hammer.

By Annie Ring. Davies’ show robs Jill of ambivalence in a way that made me wonder how we can avoid our queer kinship relationships being complicit with neoliberal reductions of the state. Thinking through ambivalence, as I do below with reference to Roszika Parker’s feminist psychoanalysis, can help us by contrast to build more critical kinship for viral times.

By Elhum Shakerifar
Haratischvili’s abiity to draw connection and perspective is part of the joy of her writing… The question of hot chocolate is a thread that runs throughout the novel, and so I recommend you invest in something truly special to accompany your reading.

By Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou. One of my favourite images from Tara Fatehi Irani’s book, Mishandled Archive, is of a bride seated on the floor. She is very still, very quiet, but her eyes speak… She is gazing at her past; she is gazing at her future, at a future waiting, watching, approaching, soon to replace this moment.

By Jenny Chamarette I don’t think it’s a coincidence that It Takes Blood And Guts and The Forty-Year-Old Version have stuck with me while I experience my own mid-life inertia, as I reflect on the unseen power of my adolescent voice and look to rebuild my own creativity. And it makes sense to me to seek out the wisdom of Black women musicians and artists to do that.

By Frances Morgan. Small actions are The Assistant’s action. They’re mostly actions that will have to be done again and again, like cleaning, calling, copying, carrying; sorting things out.