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.
Jenny Clarke Listening to Lizzie Borden and Jessie Rovinelli talk So Pretty, Working Girls, and Beyond This Culture Club entry …
By Reba Martin Courtney Barnett’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit is available on Spotify, Youtube and …
Casa Nem is an occupied house where LGBT people, mainly sex working trans women of colour, can stay and live together. Indianara is the founder. The film is full of shots of the girls hanging out at Casa Nem or Indianara’s place: in a pool, dancing tits out, getting ready or whatever. It’s so rare to see trans women lounging around together and having fun on screen.
It was here that I discovered Sofia Coppola, here that I learned of the Lisbon sisters and their tragic fates, here that I felt the first stirs of recognition. Five young girls, entombed in suburbia, with no way out.
My friend warned me when she got me the book. I kept it on a table for two weeks before I picked it up. Five days so that if it had traces of Covid on it, it would die. Nine days to gather the courage. The book she was talking about is Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House.
By Irenosen Okojie You can watch A Place of Rage for $9.99/£8.00 (50% off) via Vimeo on Demand here; thanks to the …
By Grace Barber-Plentie. Illustration by Javie Huxley. The Between Us We Have Everything We Need short film programme was available …
By Cathy Brennan The Lighthouse is available to rent from Vimeo on Demand via Fixafilm until Thursday 6th August, as …
I love Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman for enacting how hard it can be to sift through history to find those trailblazers who actually left little trace behind them. And also, how history doesn’t always reward us with heroism.
A small gesture to re-inscribe women into film history, as Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight point out, changes not just women’s film history but all film history.
By Grace Barber-Plentie. What Sweet Sugar Rage does so successfully is to show resistance as well as solidarity through art and problem-solving. The women in this film provide community – they listen to each others problems, but more than that, they offer viable solutions.
By Andrea Luka Zimmerman Daisies is available to stream via Second Run’s new Vimeo on Demand service, £4.99 for one …
By Lizzie Borden and Jessie Rovinelli SO PRETTY is being released on June 12 by Sentient.Art.Film in the US. International …
By Hyun Jin Cho Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals is available …
By Clara Bradbury-Rance Clara’s book Lesbian Cinema After Queer Theory is forthcoming in paperback from Edinburgh University Press. Netflix is available …
I have been thankful, during social isolation, for the generosity of the many media artists, especially women of colour, who have shared their work on the Internet. Among them is Rea Tajiri, whose classic, half-hour experimental documentary video, History and Memory, has long been hard to see outside of art spaces and classrooms.
WHERE I GROW OLD also acts as a love letter to the city where Rocha was born and co-created TEIA, a collective based in Belo Horizonte. It showcases a city which is rarely documented on screen
