Cinenova: Now Showing began in March 2015 and runs monthly. The series intends to materialise relationships between contemporary artist moving image practice and the feminist and organising legacies present in the Cinenova collection. For this Now Showing, artist-filmmaker Kimberley O’Neill has chosen to show a film from the Cinenova collection alongside her own work, Circuits of Bad Conscience. Based around a science fiction premise, Circuits of Bad Conscience explores the transmission of affective energy between exploited viewers in a media circuit. The various characters that appear are formed from a cross-fertilisation of personal experiences, historical figures and commercial media material. Ideological power is engrained on the body and characterised as media-made-flesh.

Films from Cinenova:

The Hired Hands - Judy Jackson, UK,1985,30mins
This documentary takes a critical look at the conditions of employment for the one in three women who work as typists, receptionists, clerks and secretaries in Great Britain and examines why women in these positions are often underpaid and exploited.

Delilah - Tanya Syed, UK,1995,12mins
A kinetic meditation on female expressions of power and desire. A chiaroscuro of tension and release.

Cinenova 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.

Cinenova currently distributes over 500 titles that include experimental film, narrative feature films, artists’ film and video, documentary and educational videos made from 1912 to 2001. Cinenova holds a large collection of paper materials, books and posters related to works it distributes, and the history and politics of film and video production. The thematics in the work at Cinenova include oppositional histories, postcolonial struggles, domestic and care work, representation of gender and sexuality, and importantly, the relations and alliances between these different struggles.

Cinenova is a collectively organised volunteer led organisation.