Women Documentary Filmmakers will explore and celebrate female
documentarians, historically overlooked in the male-dominated documentary film
world.
Curated by Dr Kirsty Fairclough of The University of Salford, In Her View will
champion these female filmmakers, with films from Mexico, India, US and UK.
From American documentarian Shirley Clarke’s 1967 Portrait of Jason, a classic piece of
cinema verité that has earned an important place in the history of queer cinema, to
more recent works including Sarita Khurana’s and Smriti Mundhra’s A Suitable Girl (2017),
which follows three young Indian women struggling to cope with the intense pressure to
get married, and Laura Herrero’s The Swirl (2016) set in the most flooded region in
Mexico, the season takes viewers on a female-focussed journey through the past 50
years of documentary cinema.
The season also includes work from high-profile female documentarians, including
Barbara Kopple’s 1990 Oscar-winning American Dream, which follows a mid-1980s
workers’ strike at a Hormel meatpacking plant in Minnesota; Lucy Walker’s Oscar-
nominated Waste Land about Brazilian artist Vik Muniz who photographs those who
scavenge in the world’s largest landfill site in Rio de Janeiro; and From the Sea to the
Land Beyond from award-winning British filmmaker Penny Woolcock, created from 100
years of archive footage of Britain’s unique coastline and accompanied by a score from
the band British Sea Power.
The screenings will be accompanied by a special ‘One Hour Intro’ event with season co-curator Dr Kirsty Fairclough who will examine how and why the dominant narrative of documentary film rarely includes the many women working within it.
In Her View season curator Dr Kirsty Fairclough commented:
“In celebrating some of the brilliant women documentary filmmakers from around the
world, In Her View will challenge the dominant narrative of documentary film, one that
has historically overlooked the many women working in this field. Women have been
working in documentary filmmaking since the very earliest days of the form, making
important films that deserve to be included in the wider history of cinema – I’m excited
to kick off 2020 and the legacy of HOME’s Celebrating Women in Global Cinema
programme by championing some of these astounding directors.”
