I spoke with writer and curator Rachel Pronger from feminist archive film collective Invisible Women about their upcoming season of coming-of-age films directed by women filmmakers at the Pictureville Cinema in Bradford. You can book tickets here.
Can you tell me what Invisible Women is about and what you want to achieve with your programming?
Invisible Women is an archive activist feminist film collective. The project started in 2017 when I was studying in Edinburgh with my my colleague and friend Camilla Baier. We were doing a master’s degree, and we got really interested in the archive and in questions around whose films get kept in archives and why we weren’t seeing more films made by women being screened. It turned out to be super complicated and totally to do with the patriarchy, like so many things are.
So we started digging and organising very DIY pop-up screenings, literally hanging up a sheet in an art gallery and projecting onto it. And what we found is that people were really interested. We thought only our friends or people who were studying with us at university would come. But we would have random people coming to our screenings, so there was clearly an appetite to watch films made by women that weren’t being screened elsewhere.
Over the years, we travelled around a lot. I lived in Edinburgh, then Newcastle, and Camilla lived in Mexico City for a while, so we often worked remotely. Then a couple of years ago, a third member joined us, Lauren Clarke, so now there’s three of us, and the current setup is I’m based in Berlin, Camilla is based in Edinburgh, and Lauren is based in Glasgow. We organise film screenings, festival collaborations, touring programmes, seasons, and retrospectives. We do them in Berlin sometimes, and we’ve also organised events in Mexico City and Athens. We get around!
Our main criteria is that we screen films made by women and non-binary people, and they have to be archive films, by which we mean historic. Anything older than 10 years for us counts as archive. But that is a wonderfully broad brief, which means that we screen stuff from right at the beginning of cinema, from the 1890s right up to the 2010s. So, it gives us a huge amount of freedom to programme films that we find interesting.
One of the points of your manifesto is “to curate is a privilege, use that position to speak truth to power” With that in mind, could you tell me about your goals and objectives with the A Time and a Place season that’s coming up at the Pictureville Cinema in Bradford?
This is a really wonderful opportunity that we were offered by Pictureville, which is in connection with the Year of Culture that’s happening in Bradford at the moment. I grew up in Bradford, so I have an emotional relationship to the city. My parents still live there. I wrote a big feature a few years ago for Sight and Sound about Bradford on film, and I’ve generally stayed very connected to the city and its cinematic history, which is really rich.
Because of that research and the piece I wrote, we ended up having lovely conversations with Rebecca, who manages the cinema at Pictureville. We did some one-off screenings last year with the Pictureville, and then with the City of Culture, they had an opportunity to offer us a full season of five feature films.
We’ve been inspired, firstly, by Bradford’s rich history of migration. Bradford is an industrial city; it has this really rich and complex history of people coming from many different places, from the Industrial Revolution onwards. It’s had a huge amount of cultural crossover and influence from lots of different countries. There’s also a strong history of Bradford, which has been formalised by being a City of Sanctuary now. We’re talking about migration and diaspora, and the way in which different diasporic groups arriving in the city have shaped the city.
The other factor that we wanted to talk about is youth, because Bradford is a city which is the youngest in the UK by some metrics. There are a few different stats that are used to demonstrate this but essentially around a third of the population is aged under 25. I was also personally inspired by being someone who came of age and became a film fan in Bradford. I used to go to the Pictureville, and I used to go to the Cineworld as well, a lot. And I felt a very strong emotional connection to Bradford as a place where I came of age as a cinema lover.
So this soup of ideas became A Time and A Place, which is a season of coming-of-age films, directed by women filmmakers. Each of the films comes from a different country, which has a link to Bradford’s diasporic history. The programme spans almost 100 years; films from the 1930s up until 2023. We have films from the then Soviet Union, modern day Ukraine, and we have a film from Canada that is centred around characters of Pakistani heritage, so that’s speaking to the Pakistani diasporic history in Bradford. We have a film from Northern Ireland as well.
So that’s the principle behind A Time and a Place.
In your blog post about the season, you mentioned the Pictureville cinema and other cinemas in the area being an escape for you. What does it mean to be showing these movies in that particular screen?
It’s obviously really nice because I have this long personal connection to that cinema. I was very much a typical teenager, and I grew up in a reasonably sized town, but I was constantly fantasising about going to London or going abroad, living a different, more exotic, exciting life. One of the reasons I got into cinema was this feeling that these films were showing me possible other ways to be and other experiences that I felt I couldn’t access in my personal life in Bradford at this time in the noughties. Obviously, it’s a great place, there were loads of brilliant things about the city and the surrounding countryside. But I think that there’s something really powerful for a lot of people when they get into film as a teenager. The sense of it as a portal into another world and of a chance to escape your own experience and broaden your horizons.
I think to go back to what you said about the manifesto, we feel really passionately in the collective that film has such powerful political possibilities because it gives you access to other points of view. I just think it’s such a powerful art form that really does something to people’s brains and it helps us to open up our horizons. And I would love it if some people who came to these screenings felt similarly to how I did as a teenager, this idea of “wow, films like this exist and a world like this exists”.
And that’s why I would love people to get out of the season.
Let’s have a little look at each of the films, then. Perhaps the best-known film of the season is Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform (1931). How do you expect the film to play today, nearly 100 years after its production?
I think it feels super modern for a film that was made in the 1930s. It has this cheeky energy to it. It’s really quite sweet and sincere about the way that it depicts the romantic attachments between the girls. I mean, it’s quite taboo in some ways because it’s between a girl and her teacher, but the way that it’s portrayed in the film is this all-consuming queer love and I think that’s very powerful.
It’s a coming-of-age story in a very pure sense in that it’s about teenagers. Some of the other films are a bit more expansive of the definition of coming-of-age, but this one fits very clearly into a certain genre: the school movie. I think that it’s really amazing to see a film made in 1931, two years before Hitler comes to power, that is a very open and obvious portrayal of queer desire with an all-female cast, a female director and a female writer.
If that was made now, it would still feel radical. It’s also a film that caused a sensation when it came out, not just in Germany, but also in other countries across Europe, and one of the reasons why we still have this film is because it was such a success in other countries. When Hitler came to power, obviously there was a lot of destruction of art that was against Nazi ideology and that included the destruction of all the prints in Germany of this film. But the reason why we have it is that there were other prints in other countries that were then rescued in later years. So it’s also an amazing story about resistance and resilience.
Nearly all the casting crew of this film left Germany as well. A lot of people involved in the making of this film were Jewish. A lot of queer people involved in the making of this film. So it’s also something that speaks quite directly to the history of exile in Germany. And many German exiles did come to Bradford as well because there was already an established German community and links with Prussia historically in Bradford. So it has quite an interesting link to the history in quite a direct way. But then it’s also a super fun school lesbian romp as well!
I hope that people will be able to feel that sense of fun when they watch it as well. I was so surprised when I first watched it because I had this idea of it in my head, and then watching it was just so much more unruly than I expected. So I think it has something really accessible in it as well, despite being almost 100 years old.
On the other side of the spectrum, your newest film in the programme is Fawzia Mirza’s The Queen of My Dreams (2023). Can you tell us a little about what the film captures of the contemporary moment in queer history and queer representation?
Firstly, I’m really happy that we have this in the mix, even though it’s not something we would normally programme because it is a modern movie and even by our very broad definitions, we don’t normally screen stuff that is this new. But one of the reasons we felt justified putting it in the programme is that it is a really fun and lively and enjoyable queer coming of age story, which captures a very specific diasporic experience because it’s about Pakistani Canadian characters.
There is a large Pakistani population in Bradford, and a lot of people are second- or third-generation. And we really wanted a film that might talk to intergenerational relationships between people from diasporic communities, and particularly, to the Pakistani experience. So this felt to us like such a perfect match in terms of the content of the material and themes, and the story. It was quite hard to resist putting this in.
The other thing that we felt really makes it work for us is that it’s also a film that is about the past as well, in quite an explicit way. Queen of My Dreams is about a young woman, Azra, who is a young Pakistani Canadian woman living in Toronto, who travels to Pakistan to go to a funeral. There she is forced to reconnect with her mother from whom she’s become estranged partly because of her queer identity.
It’s a story about the mother-daughter relationship and also about how the specific way that being queer within certain diasporic communities can be quite difficult. But then, also what the film does is it then flashes back to 1960s Karachi, in which we see the experiences of Azra’s mother, Mariam, and we see how she experienced growing up herself. You have a coming-of-age story happening in two different time zones; the 1960s and the present day. That felt to us like a wonderful summary of everything we’re doing in this season. It’s got this really brilliant thematic connection from both directions.
And you also get these fun, vibrant musical style sequences set in 1960s Karachi, which is just quite unusual. You haven’t really seen those a lot in other contemporary films. This is a really special film, a really fun film and probably the most directly accessible because it’s newer and because it comes from this very accessible genre. But it also speaks to very much to the themes about history and about intergenerational relationships and identity that are running through the entire season.
In terms of diaspora, you also have these two films paying homage to the Eastern European population and migration to Bradford. You have Ildikó Enyedi’s My 20th Century. Can you tell us about the film and its place in the programme?
My 20th Century is one of the most beautiful films I think I’ve ever seen. It’s has this beautiful black and white photography. It’s set largely on New Year’s Eve, 1899, when these two estranged twins who were born on the streets of Budapest encounter each other as young women on the Orient Express.
The film just captures this idea of dawning modernity in Europe and this sense of Europe at a moment of transition. So, revolutionary politics is very much part of the story. There’s also this interplay at the heart of the story about the different directions women’s lives take depending on circumstances.
One of the separated sisters becomes a revolutionary, and one becomes basically becomes a courtesan, who’s working her way through society one man at a time. So it’s very interesting about gender politics and about women, but it’s also this spellbinding counter-history of Europe.
We wanted to have a Hungarian film in the mix because there was a significant migration from Hungary after the uprising in 1956, which was crushed by the Soviet invasion. At that time, around 2000 Hungarians arrived in Bradford. So that’s the particular historical point we wanted to touch on by including that film. For us this particular film one that if you ever have an excuse to program, you screen it, because seeing it in a cinema is a real treat.
Kira Muratova’s The Long Farewell (1971) fits very neatly into those considerations, can you tell me about the decision to include that in the programme?
The Long Farewell is a film from Kira Muratova, who is one of the iconic Ukrainian filmmakers working during the Soviet Union. She’s an auteur. Her films have this very strong, eccentric, quirky energy to them. They’re often quite intense relationship dramas. They have an atmosphere that’s really hard to describe, they exist completely in their own world, very much inside women’s heads, a lot of the time. And they’re often films that are very frank about the experiences of women in terms of relationships, motherhood, sexuality, romantic relationships, etc.
We wanted to include a Ukrainian film because Bradford has strong historic links to Ukraine. And also obviously in the past few years, that link has continued with Ukrainian refugees coming to many places in the UK, but also to Bradford. I think The Long Farewell is a really interesting film because it is a coming-of-age story, which is about a mother and a son. Both characters are having this revelatory experience at the same time. The teenage son is asserting his independence, preparing to leave home, and the middle-aged mother in the film is coming to terms with the fact that her son wants this independence.
The Long Farewell is a really interesting film from a cinema history point of view. It’s also interesting because it was made in 1971, but it wasn’t actually screened until 1987 in Eastern Europe because of Soviet censorship. Muratov was someone who often fell afoul of the censors, so it has a very interesting contested history. It’s a film that I’ve seen, I think three times in the cinema now. And every time I watch it, it’s a new experience because it’s just so different to anything else..
It’s definitely one for more daring viewers, I would say, but it’s absolutely a film that could blow your mind if you go in the right conditions. And I think crucially for this season, what appeals to us about screening it is this idea about talking about mothers and sons coming of age in parallel and also specifically wanting to represent Ukraine’s really rich cinematic history in this programme. Obviously any film about Ukraine in the seventies is going to speak to what’s happening today because that whole history is so closely tied to what’s happening in Ukraine right now. So that was also why we wanted to include it.
That just leaves Margot Harkin’s Hush-a-Bye Baby (1989). One of the things that interests me about this film is that it was originally made for television. I was wondering if you could tell me about your personal experience of it and how you think it’ll work in a theatrical space.
That’s a really good question. A little bit about the history of Hush-a-Bye Baby; this film was produced by the Derry Film and Video Workshop in the eighties. And it was made for television, so it has a slightly rougher look than some of the other films we’re screening. But what I think is really fascinating about this film is it shows you a side of Northern Ireland through young female eyes during the troubles in a way that you don’t really see that much of. Sure, now we have Derry Girls, but there’s not a ton of contemporary material from the time which offered this first perspective. Hush-a-Bye is framing the experience of living under repressive circumstances, with British soldiers on the streets, through the eyes of a teenage girl.
At the same time, that political context is not necessarily the main point of the film. It’s really a coming-of-age story and a story about reproductive rights, set against the backdrop of the troubles and all the colonial history that feeds into that. It’s subtle thematically in the way that it explores those ideas. There’s some really interesting scenes set in an Irish class, and scenes of discussions between the lead character who’s Catholic and her friends. It offers you a very multidimensional portrait of Northern Ireland, and of Derry, during this time.
The film was produced by Channel 4 and RTÉ, so it does have a kind of gritter, earthier energy than some of the other work we’re screening. But one of the reasons why we try and introduce and write about a lot of the films we screen, is if you want to have a more expansive history of cinema, then you need to look at the places where women and other marginalised people were able to make films. Often, that meant working in TV or in lower-budget areas, like documentary. A lot of women have worked really effectively in documentary over the years for instance. In our experience, once you offer that context about how and why the work was made, it becomes more accessible to audiences. This can open a door to a wealth of revelatory, underseen material which may not have been screened widely in cinemas, but which really benefits from collective viewing.
Hush-a-Bye was made within a television world, but it has also screened in cinemas more and more, especially recently, because it offers such a warm, human, engaging story which also happens to be super politically relevant in it’s discussion of colonial legacies, Irish identity and reproductive freedom. But I also want to emphasise that it’s a fun watch! It’s lively and energetic, with great performances from the young cast, especially Emer McCourt in the lead role. Plus, it has a small supporting performance from Sinéad O’Connor, and also some music from her too. So that’s a little draw for the Sinéad O’Connor fans!
It’s also worth flagging that it is a film which was made by women within a specific feminist collective context and is therefore explicitly feminist in its themes. The director, Margot Harkin, and the co-writer, Stephanie English, wrote the script based on deep research and interviews with teenage girls, so it comes with this real authenticity of experience and voice.
You’ve drawn these five films from over a hundred years of film history and from some really interesting places. Curation is an act of creation and you’ve created this programme out of these different elements. Can you tell me a little about the ethical considerations or what you feel you owe to the filmmakers and the responsibilities you may have in putting these films in conversation with each other at this particular time in this setting?
That’s such a good question. We talk about this all the time, as you can imagine. I think you can do this in a really irresponsible way, taking films from different contexts and just putting them together and saying, “Oh, they have a thematic similarity, therefore it’s okay just to screen these things next to each other.” That can be really problematic, especially because while within the collective we are three women with very different life experiences, from different nationalities, we do ultimately have a limited perspective in the grand scheme of the world.
We try to be careful about the way we talk about films, the way that we represent certain points of view, and how much our own unconscious and conscious biases come into the mix. When you work as a feminist programmer or a queer programmer, or really any programmer from a historically marginalized group, there’s a bigger burden of representation on you because you feel like every programme needs to represent the widest possible perspective.
But being a woman or being a queer person is one aspect of a complex intersectional identity. You’re never going to touch upon everything in one programme. We’re really aware of this, and we try to do this thoughtfully, although of course we do make mistakes. Having conversations like this is really good because it gives me a chance to say a bit more about why we’ve chosen these films and put them in this order. We always write quite careful copy to explain the thought process behind our curation.
And we try to be there in person as much as we can at our screenings to introduce films and put certain things together. Another thing that is important to mention is that when you’re curating with archive, there are lots of barriers, which means that maybe there are films you want, that you can’t get. We’re really pleased with what we have in the programme, and it’s come together beautifully. But when you try to put together a programme, there are often budget limitations, because historical film is really expensive to screen, and there may be access limitations, because certain materials might not be available. You might not be able to get a high enough quality digital transfer or a physical print. So you always have to consider these things as a curator. You’re not usually working with all the materials that you would in an ideal world have.
That’s part of the job: working out what you can access and how you can then present that in a way that makes sense to an audience and is the best possible experience for an audience as well. I would emphasise how happy we are with this selection. I think it’s a really beautiful selection of films, but obviously, there’s always one that got away. Or there’s a world where we show 10 films and showcase experiences from many more different diasporic perspectives. Hopefully, what we are doing is giving people a thought-provoking glimpse of different experiences and getting them thinking about film in a slightly different way.
What can audiences expect from an Invisible Women screening?
I think they can expect to see something unexpected, to see something that makes them see cinema a bit differently, that maybe offers them perspectives they’ve not seen on screen before. I hope that if they come to one with an introduction, they will get a really lovely run-up into the film, some historical context and a sense of how we work as curators that will enhance the screening.
And if we can’t be there in person and they get a chance to read our programme note, then hopefully that also gives them a sense of the wider historical story behind the films that we screen. And most of all, I hope that they leave the cinema feeling just a tiny little bit changed by what they’ve seen in some way. Either with a broader sense of what film can be, or a revelation about a new filmmaker, an insight into a place or historical moment that they’ve not seen on screen before. And we also just want them to have a good time. We screen films that we love, and sometimes those films are more challenging than others in terms of the subject matter. But I would say all our films have joy and beauty and magic in them as well as real-life hard stuff. So I hope they also feel inspired and delighted by cinema as well as part of the experience.
Rachel Pronger is a writer and curator, and co-founder of archive activist feminist film collective Invisible Women. You can follow Invisible Women’s work via their website (https://www.invisible-women.co.uk/) or Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/invisiblewomen_archives/).
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