FEMEXFILMARCHIVE Contributor Toolkit

Professor Irene Lusztig, UC Santa Cruz

Professor Julie Wyman, UC Davis

Interviews with Feminist Experimental Filmmakers Contributor Toolkit

This collaborative project is an ongoing collective archive of interviews with feminist experimental filmmakers started in 2017 by feminist filmmaking students at UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis. Our students were invited to each select a filmmaker, research their work in detail, and invite the filmmaker to have a conversation with them. We encouraged our students to think about things like how to find their own creative role models, how to learn from listening, and how to learn from intergenerational feminist conversation. Most (though not all!) of these makers personally identify as both feminist and experimental makers, and many of these conversations invite the filmmakers to respond directly to those labels–sometimes in complicated ways.

We hope that this website can continue to grow into a database and useful resource, so we’ve created a toolkit to share how we set up this interview project for our students and to make it possible for others to add interviews to the project. While we’ve written this toolkit with other instructors in mind — we would love to see educators implement this project in their film classrooms — we also invite anyone to submit an interview, whether or not they are a student. We want the project to continue to expand, to become broader and more inclusive, and to introduce us all to new makers, voices, and works.

Keywords: experimental film, feminism, theory and practice