Dispatch
feminist moving image 

The London Short Film Festival (LSFF) returns for its 15th iteration on January 12th with an expansive programme of shorts from the UK and beyond. The festival is well known for championing emerging British film talent, showcasing early experimental works and delving i...

The previous essay focussed on Jane Fonda’s two Oscar speeches, using them as frames to consider her political engagement with a view to understanding how she navigated her activism with her stardom and celebrity image. In this essay I want to look at Fonda from the po...

Jane Fonda is a  compelling and complex figure. She is 80 this year, on 21st December, and I am interested in looking at her life and work, celebrating its key moments and my interests in them. She is a two-time Academy Award winner, a dedicated activist, and a singula...

The Host is the latest film by Miranda Pennell in which she explores her family history and the history of the Anglo Iranian Oil Company, now BP, where her father worked. Pennell speaks over hundreds of photographs from the company’s and her family’s archives, alongsid...

To anyone with a basic understanding of film theory Laura Mulvey’s name will inspire myriad thoughts on feminism and the male gaze. For those who engage in film practice Mulvey’s film’s represent a connection between theoretical undertaking — inspiration — and the crea...

As detailed in Little White Lies’ wonderfully comprehensive list, this year’s LFF programme showcased 112 feature and short films directed by women. The Weinstein allegations and subsequent outpouring of experience, empathy and introspection cast a long shadow over the...

Colombian director Laura Mora has presented her first feature film Matar a Jesús (Killing Jesus) as part of the Festival’s New Directors section, dedicated to first and second works where it received the Special Mention. In the film, Paula, a photography student, witne...

Anahí Berneri’s fifth and third film competing in San Sebastián follows a young prostitute, mother of a one-year-old boy who gets kicked out of her apartment after a raid. With neither her phone (confiscated by the police) nor a home, she is unable to work and, therefo...

Fatoş Üstek is a name that is becoming increasingly prevalent in galleries across London. Working as an independent curator Üstek has developed an impressive CV, having curated projects such as fig-2, Art Night 2017, an opera in five acts at DRAF, and a variety of high...

Cheryl Dunye is a film director, producer, screenwriter, editor, and actor. She is Black and identifies as a lesbian. Dunye became visible in the 1990s, being a part of what’s known as the Queer New Wave or New Queer Cinema, an independent film movement centered around...

I am not simply using fragments of my body as containers for memory but these fragments transform in my imagination to become parts of structures, buildings, landscapes, enclosures and caves. They hide but also protect my past but because they are parts of my body, tha...

documenta 14 is the 14th edition of the quinquennial art exhibition held in Kassel. Founded by Arnold Bold in 1955 to help reignite artistic culture in a post-war germany, documenta has a reputation for subversiveness as it pushes back against a white eurocentric art s...

The history of Shakespeare adaptation for the screen is long and diverse. It has crossed spatial, lingual and generic boundaries. Were the World Mine (Tom Gustafson, 2008) is not an exception. It incorporates Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a romantic musi...

Being a woman in film is hard. As of this year only four women have ever been nominated for the 'Best Director' award at the Oscars and only one has ever won. According to statistics published by The Hollywood Reporter  female directors make up for just 7% of directors...

This past week Emma Watson won the award for best performance by an actor in a film at the MTV movie awards. This marked the first time their performance awards – and any awards show’s performance awards for that matter – were not separated based on the performer’s gen...