Women in Focus is a joint UK-Ireland collaboration between the University of East Anglia, Maynooth University, and the University of Sussex; funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Irish Research Council (IRC), as part of the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities scheme.
The Women in Focus project brings into focus a wide range of women amateur filmmakers whose creative work has been overlooked and/or unacknowledged within archives. Working closely with two partner archives, the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA) and the Irish Film Archive (IFA), it has conducted new research into existing collections of largely unknown women amateur filmmakers.
By identifying significant gaps in knowledge at the level of cataloguing, accession records, historical research, and metadata – and by adopting feminist methodologies that allow us to challenge existing practices –the project is working toward creating a fuller picture of women’s contributions to amateur filmmaking. To this effect, Women in Focus has also collaborated with the AMDB to incorporate a database-wide new tag, ‘women filmmakers,’ that can be applied to all films included in the database to which women have contributed to the filmmaking in any capacity. The Women in Focus team is also retroactively applying this tag to films that are already in the database. You can learn more about this process and the tag below, and can see the growing list of films here.
Another key output of the project is a usable and adaptable toolkit that will allow any moving image archive, or archive interested in collecting in this area, to create more effective, useful and accessible records about women filmmakers. You can read more about the project and access the toolkit on our project website.
Locating Women Filmmakers and their work in AMDB relies upon the effective tagging of records where women are in evidence. We know that amateur practice is often more fluid than the professional world, with women and men undertaking multiple varied roles within the production of a film. As such, the tag has been applied to records where women’s names appear in a record – in any capacity, not just as the named lead filmmaker.
It is hoped, through engaging more users with these records we will be able to increase our knowledge of the films and filmmakers involved in production and refine the language we use to describe their work.
You can start by clicking this link, which will lead you to, at the time of writing in 2024, a list of over 300 films that have already been tagged and identified as being made with the participation of women filmmakers.
If you see the ‘women filmmakers’ tag included on any record, you can also click that tag and you will be led to the same list.
Alternatively, you can search the term ‘women filmmakers’ in the search bar and select a record from the populated list, to see whether the ‘women filmmakers’ tag has been applied to it.
This tag has been applied by the Women in Focus project team to records where women are in evidence.
You can let us know by dropping us an email. Tell us who you have found and what evidence you have and we’ll update the AMDB entry.
Email: amdb@ucalgary.ca
Amateur Cinema