The Best Documentaries of 2019 Directed by Women

Published on Screen Queens, Link to Full Article:https://screen-queens.com/2019/12/22/the-best-documentaries-of-2019-directed-by-women/amp/ 2019 has been an enormous year for documentary filmmaking. With streaming sites like Netflix bringing audiences the likes of Fyre on the infamous Fyre Festival that never took place and Knock Down The House on America’s female candidates running for congress and challenging the status quo, documentaries have become more accessible…

TIFF Arab Women Filmmakers Retrospective: Desire, Sexuality and Freedom in Raja Amari’s “Red Satin”

Published on In Their Own League, Link to Full Article: https://intheirownleague.com/2019/09/18/tiff-arab-women-filmmakers-retrospective-desire-sexuality-and-freedom-in-raja-amaris-red-satin/ This year at Toronto International Film Festival a retrospective, Here and Now: Contemporary Arab Women Filmmakers was held, casting a spotlight on the largely under screened cinema of the Middle East and North Africa. Showcasing the likes of Saudi-Arabia’s Haifaa Al-Mansour, Lebabon’s Nadine Labaki, Syria’s Soudadi Kadaan as well as…

‘For Sama’ and ‘At Five in the Afternoon’: War Through the Female Gaze

Published on Screen-Queens, Link to full article: https://screen-queens.com/2019/09/14/dbw-for-sama-and-at-five-in-the-afternoon-war-through-the-female-gaze/ Cinematic representations of war have long been depicted by men and by the Western world, producing narratives that centre around male characters and give little to no voice to those on the other side of the conflict. We only need to consider the countless representations of war…

Cultural Identity in Fatih Akin’s ‘Love, Death and The Devil’ Trilogy

“I have dual German and Turkish citizenship. I consider myself as a German director... but my personality is split in two – and I still don’t know whether I am a Turk or a German.” (Cooke & Homewood, 2011, p.244). In 1961 Germany faced a labour shortage and made a labour recruitment agreement in which…

Defining Social Realism: A Comparative Analysis of I, Daniel Blake and Archipelago

The concept of ‘realism’ first emerged in the 19th century (Lay, 2002). In British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit (2002), Samantha Lay talks about a number of social and structural changes that occurred in the 19th century that led to the conceptualisation of realism. This included changes such as “the move from the…

Female Filmmakers Rule the Kenyan Film Industry

Whilst figures of the participation of women in screen industries such as Hollywood are staggeringly low in all roles from director to writer to editor, the participation of women in Kenyan screen industries stands out as something highly unique in comparison. Of the top one hundred grossing films of 2016 in Hollywood, women made up of only 4% of the directors, 11% of the writers, 14% of the editors and 3% of the cinematographers (Women and Hollywood, 2017). In the Kenyan film industry women make up to more than 50% of the industry (Nelmes & Selbo, 2015). Not only do women dominate the industry in terms of working in it but it was women who kick-started the national film industry and continue to be at its forefront.

The Cow (1969) and Teshome Gabriel’s ‘Third World Cinema’

Teshome H. Gabriel’s ‘Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films’ presents multiple notions of the conventions of Third World films in terms of film technique. He presents a ‘genealogy’ of Third World film culture that consists of three phases. Phase one is ‘The Unqualified Assimilation’ in which “foreign images are impressed in an alienating…

Protected: Transforming and Transcending Gender in Orlando & Boys Don’t Cry

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Orality in West African Cinema: Language and Power

A truly national African cinema created by African filmmakers did not form until the mid 1950s to 1960s when French West Africa gained independence from European colonisation (Pfaff, 2004). Up until 1960 France had made it illegal for Africans to make films of their own and in 1966 the pioneering African filmmaker Ousmane Sembène made the first ever feature film to be released by a sub- Saharan African director (Vulture, 2015).