Reel Women 1st Anniversary Fanzine

@ReelWomenUK

REEL WOMEN is a monthly film night dedicated to the work of female filmmakers.

Birthday Special ‘Zine: Reel Women’s Voices

Back to School with Joanna Hogg Rachel Tunnard on ADULT LIFE SKILLS Refugee Voices In Film “You shall not pass!” Wheelchairs unwelcome at Cannes

@REELWOMENUK

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, REEL WOMEN! A balmy Thursday evening, the 25th of June to be exact, marked the first ever Reel Women event.

A small but enthusiastic crowd gathered to watch some carefully selected shorts that had screened at Cambridge Film Festival in previous years. We were a ragtag bunch of gals and feeling our way in the dark when we started out, but soon began to flourish with amazing support from the Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge Film Festival, Bums on Seats, Take One and many more. Under the coordination of Jenny Clarke and a fantastic committee of creative, passionate and intelligent women my initial idea has bloomed into something extraordinary.

Whilst still brimming with possibility for bigger and greater things, we have achieved so much in the last 12 months. Who would have thought, back then, that we’d already be branching out into supporting feature films, networking at international festivals and being welcomed as a voice for all sorts of media projects and speaking panels. Thank you to Jenny for being the backbone to the whole kit and kaboodle, to Rosy Hunt for being our editor-in-chief, to Kayleigh Barnes for many of our marketing materials; and to both her and Allison Clare for keeping us relevant in the digital age. Thanks to Cat Smith for being our champion in the halls of the Picturehouse, to Loreta Gandolfi for being a lioness when called for, to Bridget Van Emmenis for being unassumingly wonderful (we saw ya!), and for the enthusiasm and excitement we’ve shared with Yosra Osman, Nahal Khabbazbashi, Lucy Rosenstiel, Day Moibi, Jess Hytner, Beth Cloughton.

To all those who’ve provided us with the coolest of poster designs each month, we salute you. To all of our cheerleaders, audience members and supporters of every kind, our deepest gratitude. But perhaps most importantly, THANK YOU to all the filmmakers who’ve allowed us to screen their work and share their talents with the world. We hope that you all go on to enjoy huge successes.

Here’s to 1 year of Reel Women. Happy anniversary everybody, and here’s to celebrating many more anniversaries in the years to come.

- Sarah McIntosh, Founder of Reel Women

Tonight’s programme offers dance, gluttony, romance, comedy, animation, horror and even a nice cup of tea!

Mend & Make Do Playground Politix Otherwise Engaged Untitled Film Scenes My Stuffed Granny Warm Snow Freak Slut

Into the Rain When Perri Met Aly

refugee Voices In Film

After a successful Watersprite International Student Film Festival earlier on in the year, Festival Director Bernadette Schramm was over at the 69th Cannes Film Festival helping to run the Refugee Voices In Film Conference up on in the Marche Du Film. Bernadette told us: Refugee Voices in Film is a conference which is organised by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and IEFTA, the International Emerging Film Talent Association. We welcomed IEFTA to Watersprite this year, the President Marco Orsini came to give a talk about documentary filmmaking and some of the challenges of subjectivity and objectivity within documentary.

So that’s basically how I know IEFTA and they asked if I would come over to Cannes to help with the conference, which was an extremely powerful and moving event which took place yesterday in the Palais des Festivals.

We had refugees speaking about their experiences, and their experiences in filmmaking as such. We had people like Alice Bragg, and Vincent Cochtel, Director of the Bureau for Europe of UNHCR, they were talking about their own experiences of filming in refugee camps and what it means to them – the different perspectives that you can get on a crisis.

There is a collective of filmmakers worldwide, and what’s really interesting is that they were all doing their thing separately, but often they’re going down the same parallel routes. So what we did yesterday was to bring all these different voices together.

You really saw at the event a community and network of people who are actively campaigning about the crisis and documenting it.

So far, some of the films that we screened yesterday, or that we screened at the doc corner we’re using them on social media, there was a whole Channel 4 series on it, so television, and also on the film festival circuits, some of the films are shorts, some of them are a series, and some are feature length films – both documentary and fiction.

At the end, we had an outreach session to ask everyone “what are you going to do now? What’s the next step to really bring out your voice and share what you’re doing to change something?” There were so many ideas going around the room as to what we can all do, so that’s going out now and people are really wanting to be activists for it.

www.refugeevoices.co.uk/

Reels, Wheels and Feels

Take One’s Jack Toye meets journalist and Cannes stalwart Rahma Rachdi Rahma Rachdi is a journalist for the European News Agency and United States Press Agency. Having used a wheelchair for the past two years after a change in personal circumstances, Rahma offered her unique perspective as a member of the press pack at Cannes this year.

JT: So you’ve been here for five days, what has been your highlight of the festival so far?

RR: The climax I would have to say is when I met many, many stars around the Entre des Artists in the Palais. The security guards put me there and said: “You sit here, don’t move. If anybody that wants to move you from here you tell them that it’s me who decides that. So stay here and take any photos you want with any stars. We allow you to.” So I met Susan Sarandon, Naomi Watts, Julianne Moore, Claude LeLouche, Kirsten Dunst, Jessica Chastain, Vanessa Paradis.

The security guys have been very kind and very friendly 99% of the time. Only 1% weren’t. And that man made me cry that day. He said something that could sound normal or natural to anyone else who wasn’t disabled, he said “You, you will never come in here.” The way he said that, and the way I received that was like: YOU, like YOU IN THE WHEELCHAIR, you will never come in.

Just half an hour later I went to watch I, DANIEL BLAKE. So it was just after this incident, so I was feeling very sensitive already. So I was transposing the film to myself as I felt the effect of Daniel, who was basically spending most of his time filling in paperwork for his healthcare centre and going in circles. Meanwhile, he was living and taking the most of it. I was thinking “oh, so it’s the same as in France then.” We have the same French system that is so tough.

JT: And yet we are both citizens of two of the richest nations in the world?

RR: Absolutely. In this movie you can see that yes, it’s a rich country with a high GDP, and we inject lots of money and lots of funds and political premises and decisions to enhance the standard life of the citizens. The citizen should be at the heart of the whole debate. But when you are facing an administration, it seems like they don’t consider the citizens as human, they are just numbers!

BACK TO SCHOOL WITH Joanna began as a photographer but soon became fascinated by the moving image and making her own Super 8 films, initially on a camera lent to her by none other than Derek Jarman. She spoke to us about her time at the National Film School where she filmed her graduation short CAPRICE, starring a then unknown Tilda Swinton.

I think I probably would have had a much easier time if my tastes hadn’t changed once I arrived. If I’d stuck with the social realism and the black and white project, and done other projects like that, I think the tutors would have understood that approach. When my ideas started to change they didn’t come on the journey with me. I don’t think they understood that I could hop from one approach to another. I remember I had a number of meetings with the Heads of Department at film school.

It would always be a struggle after that point, when the ideas started to change.

But there were always one or two tutors who I found understood me a bit better and there were very good things about that time, but it was also challenging, and I remember sometimes I’d think I might have fared better in an art school atmosphere, where you could freely experiment more. I think they felt that once I’d embarked on the journey of ideas I was already pursuing before I went to film school, that I should stay on that path. They always wanted to be sure of how something was going to work out. For me, that didn’t seem to be the point of being at film school or art school; it’s about experimenting, failing… There’s nothing wrong with failing or making a mistake; actually that’s a really good time to do it, rather than pretend you are somehow already in the film industry. There was this idea that you were put through quite a tough time in film school in order to help you survive in the industry outside. I don’t think I really understood that. It depends on what kind of films you want to make, anyway.

Having successfully rebelled while at film school and made the films that I wanted to make, there was a point after leaving film school where those voices – saying you need more experience in certain areas, or these ideas are too frivolous, or whatever it was – these finally got to me and I remember thinking I should go and get some experience in television. That I should work on the ground and be a jobbing director for a bit. Get more experience working with actors and working with somebody else’s script, and all of that. So I had this idea that I had to prove myself somehow – I don’t know what happened to the rebellious streak at that point. And once I started working in television it was very difficult to hop off, because it’s nice work and you’re getting paid regularly. It has its small pleasures.

http://www.anosamours.co.uk/

Female filmmakers at Belfast Film Fest 2016:

evolution It’s been over ten years since Lucile Hadžihalilović made an indelible impression with her first feature INNOCENCE (2004).

EVOLUTION is another dark, colour-saturated, gothic body-horror movie about the experience of a child growing up. Where INNOCENCE took on the altered sensation point-of-view of a young pre-adolescent girl as she began to experience her awakening as a woman, EVOLUTION follows a similar journey from the perspective of an 11 year old boy. If the same concerns are there about the mysteries of the body and the changes it undergoes, the sequences that follow the boy’s journey to a somewhat less definable outcome are somewhat less easily defined.

Nicholas lives on the coastline of a rocky island. The dark volcanic rocks and sand contrast with the blocky white houses of a little village, battered by the winds and sea. There are no men on the island, just single boys, each of them cared for by their mother. Perhaps ‘guardian’ might be a better description, as the ‘mothers’ all have an androgynous/amphibious quality and there is little that resembles a normal family situation here. Nicholas’ drawings show that he is familiar with the trappings of life beyond the island, and he has an inquisitive nature.

Venturing where he is not supposed to go, Nicholas witnesses some strange creatures in the sea indulging in some disturbing behaviour with the ‘mothers’. His sense of something deeply unsettling taking place on the island is confirmed when he is admitted for an unusual procedure at the hospital. It’s clear that Hadžihalilović is putting more trust in instinct and improvisation here, exploring ideas and sensations by allowing them to follow their own unconventional path.

The director has spoken of her own childhood experience of her body being probed by outsiders while undergoing an appendix operation, and the even more uncomfortable matter of her body being opened up for an operation. The sensations of that experience are not unexpectedly associated here with a squeamishness or fascination about strange nature of childbirth, but the use of a young boy as the vehicle for those fears makes the procedures feel even more invasive, suggesting that there are other psychological and biological factors involved.

The director allows those more mysterious sensations relating to the body to be further complicated by associating them with the flow of water, with starfish and other strange creatures that live beneath the surface of the sea. EVOLUTION doesn’t have a strongly defined narrative, communicating the strange nature of biological transformation through images, rhythms, patterns and sounds: not so much an out-of-body experience as an inner body one...

Rachel Tunnard talks to Reel Women founder Sarah McIntosh about her new comedy film which is on general release now.

When I finished writing the script for Adult Life Skills it started getting a bit of attention within the BFI and places, but I hadn’t directed anything apart from some videos.

And someone at the BFI said to me, “Are you gonna direct it?” and I was going, “No, I don’t think so...” and he said, “If you aren’t prepared to have a go at directing it then you’re not allowed to moan about the fact that there are no female filmmakers”. And I - I really like moaning.

So we agreed that I should make a short film, as a test, and I was given the option of either shooting some scenes from the film or to make a standalone short film using some of the characters and scenarios, and so that’s what I did. I wrote a separate short film and we shot that back in January 2014. I didn’t totally mess it up, and so six months later we were shooting the feature.

talking animals - I don’t know why I’ve done it!” So we had to kill the otter. The otter became a snorkeller.

I have got loads of projects on the go.

I’m doing a film with Film Four which is about the break up of a friendship over the course of a road trip, and I’m doing a TV programme with Channel Four and another in America— when I was writing this script I was always very conscious as an editor that I’d edited lots of directors’ first features and they’d only been doing one thing, and then it came out and they spent a year going around film festivals getting drunk with the same skint filmmakers.

“...we had to kill the otter...”

And then they’d come home and get in the bath and cry and go, “What am I gonna do now?” and then write a new film, and they’re right back at the beginning. And so I always had two or three different projects on the boil when I was doing this one. I would recommend doing that if you are a writer: always be working in the industry.

I like writing.

The first draft of the script had a talking otter in it, and he used to sing songs by the pop artist Seal to the main character. She used to go swimming in a lake and he used to pop up and be like, “We’re never gonna survive...”. Everyone loved the otter - when we were making the short film, the BFI and everyone kept saying, “Are you going to put some magic realism into the short film, because it’s quite Everyone always talks about having a strong element in the feature film?” and I writer’s block—that’s just a lack of was going, “Mmyeah, I’m not going to”. willingness to make a decision! If you worry too much, it stops you from And then we made the short film and creating. If you have confidence in the fact there isn’t any, and it went well like I said, that you’ll have lots of ideas, and make and suddenly the feature film was up the some mistakes but somehow out of that producer and go, “I don’t like films with you’ll find your way.

Sisters In Arms In the past year, awareness of gender inequality in the film industry has exploded and Reel Women is definitely not alone in its promotion of female filmmakers.

Reel Women’s Jenny Clarke picks just a few of her favavourite organisations who also battle inequality in cinema: Circles

Where it all began, this exhibiting and distributing collective founded in the 1970s was at the centre of the feminist film production at the time.

Cinenova

The current home for many of Circles and Cinema of Women’s films. Based at The Showroom in Sheffield. Have a look through their database to find all kinds of films and filmmakers.

The Bechdel Test Fest

Started last year, this amazing group programmes only films which pass the Bechdel Test. Personal highlight: their celebration of Nora Ephron through her two films about food: Julie & Julia and Heartburn.

Cinema of Women

Operated throughout the 1980s bringing feminist cinema to the British public, without them films like BORN IN FLAMES or MAEDCHEN IN UNIFORM would hardly be known at all.

Club des Femmes

A Queer Feminist Film Curating Collective. It doesn’t get much better than that. Personal highlight: Bringing Greenham Home, their celebration of the queer feminist politics of Greenham Common.

Raising Films

An organisation aimed at pinpointing and then changing the problems in the industry that prevent parents and carers from creating the films they want to create!

#womanwithamoviecamera

Initiated by Sight&Sound, this is an ongoing project at the BFI to bring more female filmmakers to the public. Highlight: Presentation of the forgotten LOSING GROUND.

Take One and Reel Women would like to thank their lovely token male writers Jack Toye and Noel Megahey for their contributions to this month’s fanzine.

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