The Feminist Film Collectives of Cinenova

In celebration of the work of Cinenova, a volunteer-run distributor in the UK dedicated to preserving and circulating a collection of 300+ independent feminist films and videos, Block Cinema presents a program of works by women-led film collectives produced in England and Jamaica in the 1970s and 80s. The program pairs two films from the Cinenova collection that address the urgent social realities experienced by women – especially as they relate to reproductive rights and labor issues -- that demonstrate the heterogeneity of collective feminist filmmaking practices.

Screening for the first time since recent digitization, Sheffield Film Co-op’s first film A WOMAN LIKE YOU (1975) blends interview and dramatization while following a married mother of two as she pleads with the UK’s National Health Service for access to an elective abortion.

The Sistren Theater Collective’s SWEET SUGAR RAGE is an essential document of the Caribbean women’s movement. Sistren’s radical pedagogy utilized dramatic workshops and guerrilla street theater as sites to develop collective action, bringing Jamaican oral and folk traditions into the production of plays and films. In SWEET SUGAR RAGE the collective travels to the sugarcane plantations of “New Sugar Town” in Clarendon, Jamaica to shed light on harsh working conditions and workshop collective alternatives, all the while working through “a constant process of consciousness raising,” according to Honor Ford-Smith, the film’s co co-director and Sistren co-founder.

Following the screening Charlotte Procter, a member of the Cinenova Working Group, will be present for conversation. 

A WOMAN LIKE YOU (18mins, 1976, UK) Sheffield Film Co-op

A drama documentary illustrating the difficulties experienced by a married woman with two children who tries to get an abortion on the NHS. A series of slides show an outpatient abortion procedure and there are interviews with a local woman doctor and a consultant gynecologist. -- Cinenova2K digitization funded by the Open University

SWEET SUGAR RAGE (56mins, 1985, Jamaica) Sistren Theatre Collective

SWEET SUGAR RAGE shows the work of and explores the methods used by the theatre collective Sistren to highlight the harsh conditions facing female workers on a Jamaican sugar estate. -- Cinenova

Cinenova is a volunteer-run organisation preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. Cinenova was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributors, Circles and Cinema of Women, each formed in 1979. Cinenova currently distributes over 300 titles that include artists’ moving image, experimental film, narrative feature films, documentary and educational videos made from the 1910’s to the early 2000’s. The thematics in these titles include oppositional histories, post and de-colonial struggles, representation of gender, race, sexuality, and other questions of difference and importantly the relations and alliances between these different struggles.

Cinenova offers access to an extensive archive and advice relating to moving image work directed by makers who identify as womxn, transgender, gender non-conforming and gender non–binary. Cinenova is informed by its history as a key resource in the UK independent film distribution sector and internationally.

Charlotte Procter is an archivist, curator, and collection & archive director at LUX, the UK's most significant collection of artists' moving image. She joined the Cinenova Working Group in 2013, a volunteer collective dedicated to preserving and circulating the feminist film and video collection, Cinenova. She has collaborated on international research, preservation, and curatorial projects, including retrospectives of experimental filmmakers Betzy Bromberg (2022) and Sandra Lahire, and co-edited Living on Air: The Films and Words of Sandra Lahire (2021). Recent projects have taken place at Project Arts Centre (Dublin), Tate Modern (London), Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastián), and Anthology Film Archives (New York).

Sheffield Film Co-op: In the early 1970s the second women’s liberation movement was engaging in raising consciousness about issues women faced in their domestic and work lives. It was soon clear that there was a need to disseminate feminist ideas about the issues to a wider audience than those women already attending meetings. A small group of women with young children in Sheffield realised that film could be a powerful means of giving women the voice that they did not have in the mainstream media. With funding from Channel 4's Independent Film and Video Department, SFC later went on to make films for broadcast and to help train new women filmmakers.

Sistren Theatre Collective, which means ‘sisterhood,’ was founded in 1977 in Kingston, Jamaica by working class women in the social, cultural and political context of Jamaica’s socialist experiment of the 1970s following the first decade of independence. Since 1977, Sistren has used art as a tool for social change for the discussion and analysis of gender-based violence and to provide solutions through organisational networks. The founding members included Vivette Lewis, Cerene Stephenson, Lana Finikin, Afolashade (then Pauline Crawford), Beverley Hanson, Jasmine Smith, Lorna Burrell Haslam, Beverley Elliot, Jerline Todd, Lillian Foster, May Thompson, Rebecca Knowles and Barbara Gayle. Assisted by the actor and director Honor Ford-Smith, the Collective was forged through a government initiative to improve employment in Jamaica’s poorest communities. Plays like Downpression Get A Blow (1977), Bellywoman Bangarang (1978), Nana Yah (1980), QPH (1981) and Domestik (1982) along with community drama workshops, presaged the documentary Sweet Sugar Rage in 1985.

Image credit: SWEET SUGAR RAGE, Sistren Theater Collective & A WOMAN LIKE YOU, Sheffield Film Co-op. Courtesy of Sistren Theater Collective, Sheffield Film Co-op, and Cinenova Distribution.

Presented as part of the series Revisiting Films By Women/Chicago ‘74

Host or Publisher The Block Museum of Art