Cinenova: Now Showing

Rehana Zaman and Lai Ngan Walsh & Women and the Law Collective
Thursday 23 April 2015
6.30-9pm

Now Showing intends to materialise relationships between contemporary artist moving image practice and the feminist and organising legacies present in the Cinenova collection.

The format of the series is that an artist filmmaker is invited to select a film from the Cinenova collection which they would like to screen alongside a work of theirs.

Rehana Zaman - Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen
2014, 49 min
Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen is an episodic video that collides a fictional soap opera about a corporate take over with documentary fragments filmed by and about female migrant workers from the self led organisation Justice for Domestic Workers Leeds (J4DW Leeds). This six part film examines the shift in gendered and racially constructed worker relations from the 1980’s to the present day.

Lai Ngan Walsh & Women and the Law Collective - Who Takes The Rap? Immigration
1986, 38 min
Who Takes The Rap? Immigration covers the history of immigration law in Britain from 1903 to the films present day. The film describes how different groups of immigrants arrived for work in the UK, only to find increasingly restrictive laws which kept them in low-paid, unskilled work and identified them as ‘undesirable’. Footage of the Garners’ Steak House strike and the Grunwick strike shows how these workers fought back against racism. Specific laws are examined and the film includes interviews with a number of immigrant women. The voices of two women rappers provide the commentary throughout, and the story of one woman’s experience in trying to bring her son into Britain runs intermittedly through the film, reinforcing its theme.

Cinenova Feminist Film and Video Distributor was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributors, Circles and Cinema of Women. Each was formed in the early 1980s in response to the lack of recognition of women in the history of the moving image. Both organisations, although initially self-organised and unfunded, aimed to provide the means to support the production and distribution of women’s work in this area, and played critical roles in the creation of an independent and radical media.

A digital archive of selected works from Cinenova distribution is available for viewing at The Showroom. Click here to book to view the digital archive

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