Teaching Fellow Alice Pember has curates ‘Trailblazers: Women in New Hollywood’, a season that reconceptualises this renaissance in American filmmaking by celebrating unsung female directors whose creativity also began to flourish in this more open filmmaking landscape, but whose work has often been unfairly overshadowed by their male counterparts.  

Spotlighting the trailblazing filmmaking of directors Claudia Weill, Barbara Loden, Joan Micklin Silver, and Kathleen Collins, the season showcases a range of their rarely-screened films from the 1970s and 80s. From Claudia Weill’s masterly examination of female friendship Girlfriends (1978), to the point zero of the modern indie rom-com Crossing Delancey (Joan Micklin Silver, 1988), the season highlights the visionary filmmaking and lasting impact of these women on contemporary American cinema. Accompanied by Q&As, expert introductions, discussions, and special events, the season invites reconsideration of this important era of American filmmaking, shedding light on women’s hard-fought (and sometimes short lived) contributions.

Tickets are available to purchase on The Garden Cinema website.

Third year Film Studies student and investigative journalist Fran Hughes reports from the screening of Lyra (2022) at Coventry Cathedral, about the murdered Northern Irish journalist Lyra McKee. The film was accompanied by a panel chaired by Professor Helen Wheatley (Director of Film and Television Studies) with Lyra's sister Nichola McKee-Corner and brother in law John Corner, the film's producer, Jackie Doyle, the Rev Dr Alex Wimberley (leader of the Corrymeela Community) and Professor Michele Aaron. Fran attended the screening as a recent recipient of the Centre for Investigative Journalism's Lyra McKee Bursary Scheme, and writes about the experience of watching the film and meeting Lyra's family

Stephen Gundle, of Film and Television Studies, has received funding of £970,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a three-year research project on the place of women in the Italian film industry in the decades after World War Two. The project builds on work undertaken by Stephen and Karl Schoonover between 2016 and 2019 on a previous AHRC project about producers and production practices in Italian cinema. The other investigators on the new project – which begins in February 2023 - will be Daniela Treveri Gennari and Silvia Dibeltulo of Oxford Brookes University.

Film and Television Studies has scored 96.3% student satisfaction for Overall Quality of Teaching and Learning in the 2022 National Student Survey.

The latest issue of Mediapolis Journal (Vol.7 No.2)Link opens in a new window has recently been published, featuring contributions by a number of researchers from Film and Television Studies at Warwick.