Club des Femmes: Tracing Experimental Feminist Imagination

Club des Femmes: Tracing experimental feminist imagination: from the archive to the post-digital. Tuesday 1 Oct, Screen 1, 6.30pm Ticket price £10/£8 conc. Join Club des Femmes for a unique film programme and workshop event, celebrating and continuing the work of the Women’s Media Resource Project, a feminist media collective running out of the Rio Cinema’s basement in the 1980s! This programme seeks to draw together not only the work of the WMRP, but of many feminist film and curating projects at the time, including Circles and Four Corners. This event is curated independently by Lucy Peters and Kat Haylett. As part of the programme we will be presenting Lucy, originally screened at the Rio by the WMRP in 1985. The filmmaker, armed only with a Bolex camera and a tape recorder, constructs a portrait of her long-lost aunt by piecing together the memories of her friends in New York. Alongside it will be a presentation of digital and archival shorts including Backcomb exploring ideas of materiality and shifting identity through experimental techniques. This is a rare opportunity to see archival 16mm films print projected, and we’re excited to bring this work to the big screen and create an intergenerational dialogue across historical and contemporary collective feminist filmmaking and curating practices.  The screening will be followed by a conversation with Selina Robertson, Professor Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck), and artist filmmaker Sarah Pucill, and following that, a short 16mm filmmaking demonstration. Screening programme: Purbo London (Ruhul Ahmin, 1982, 15 mins, digital) when you walk through the storm (Petra Cortright , 2009, 2 mins, digital) i want to be alone (Molly Soda, 2023, 3 mins digital) Backcomb (Sarah Pucill, 1995, 6 mins, 16mm) Lucy (Verena Rudolph, 1984, 47 mins, 16mm) Zine making workshop at Four Corners Friday 04 October, details tbc As part of this event, there will also be a zine-making workshop at Four Corners Gallery. The zines will be constructed from materials from the Rio’s archive, building on the theme of materiality and the continuing nature of a living archive. Accompanying the workshop will be a screening of a selection of Bev Zalcock’s short films, who was instrumental to Four Corners’ history of filmmaking and programming. This programme is presented in collaboration with Club des Femmes, Rio Cinema, Four Corners and Birkbeck, University of London with a grant from Open Society University Network (OSUN) Experiential Learning Institute, “From Communities into Audiences: Changing Lives through Film”.