Review: ‘American Honey’
The road movie, particularly the American road movie, is a genre with a long and rich heritage. Its protagonists are…
Portrait of Alice Diop
Review: ‘The Dreamed Ones’
It is difficult to escape the feeling of being an interloper when listening to intimate letters spoken aloud. In the…
Portrait of Françoise Etchegaray
Portrait of Monika Treut
“I think it’s very important to show women who don’t fit in and who don’t care if society judges them….
Review: ‘Baden Baden’
Rachel Lang’s Baden Baden begins as the protagonist Ana finds her way to the film set where she works. She…
‘Born in Flames’ and the No Future of Afrofuturism
Released in 1983, Lizzie Borden’s film Born in Flames shows us the politics of time that a queer Black female…
The Monster and the Other: reading gender in Victor Erice’s ‘The Spirit of the Beehive’
The monster is not what society has repressed, but what society adheres to – Peter Evans, 1982 Haunting and ethereal,…
Portrait of Marion Vernoux
Portrait of Nelly Kaplan
“I asked the censor what was wrong with my film. He said, ‘The female protagonist is immoral: she sleeps around…
Portrait of Beeban Kidron
Portrait of Sophie Fiennes
A woman’s art: Sophie Maintigneux, Eric Rohmer and female friendship
François Truffaut once claimed that cinema is a ‘woman’s art, that’s to say the art of the actress. The director’s…
Strangers in the Village? On ‘Borderline’ and Belonging
‘From all available evidence, no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came’. James Baldwin’s…
Portrait of Sarah Gavron
Beyond the Femme Fatale: Female Crime Writers in the 20th Century
You’re a private eye working late. There’s a glass of scotch on your desk. The air is filled with cigarette…
Portrait of Amber Fares
On ‘Regarding Susan Sontag’
I The documentary opens on Susan Sontag’s profile to camera, the black of a television studio beyond. “I love being…
Where We Are Is Here: On the Influence of Female Filmmakers
When Sally Potter’s first feature film The Gold Diggers opened in London in 1983, the British Film Institute invited her…
Lesbian Films Don’t Make Money
A couple of years ago my producer and I were attending film festivals trying to raise money for our next…
Moon Signs: Jacques Rivette in the 1970s
The sad news of Jacques Rivette’s death on 29 January 2016 came just a month or so after some of…