A recent dip in female-led theatrical releases in the UK - back to 2018 levels of 26% reminds us that our work is far from over; that we cannot be complacent.
Below you can read about the research we conduct into gender representation in film and the wider industry, tracking the release landscape to present an accurate picture of investment in films by filmmakers of marginalised genders.
Here you can also find out about news and opportunities at Reclaim The Frame, along with curated film recommendations, filmmaker interviews, and creative responses.
Mudbound is the debut novel by American author Hillary Jordan. It has been translated into French, Italian, Serbian, Norwegian, Swedish, and Turkish and has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide. The novel took Jordan seven years to write.
Jordan’s indelible portrayal of two families caught up in the blind hatred of a small Southern town earned the prestigious Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded biennially to a first literary novel that addresses issues of social injustice.
Set just after the end of World War Two in 1946, this is a harsh Southern novel that encapsulates the Jim Crow era. It is set in the Mississippi Delta on a cotton farm, where life is hard and the work is backbreaking, and the brown colour dominates the mudbound landscape.
MUDBOUND – THE FILMis a 2017 American historical drama film directed by Dee Rees and written by Rees and Virgil Williams, based on the 2008Mudbound is a 2017 American historical drama film directed by Dee Rees and written by Rees and Virgil Williams, based on the 2008 novel of the same name by Hillary Jordan. It stars Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Clarke, Jason Mitchell, Jonathan Banks, and Mary J. Blige.
Mudbound follows the intersecting lives of white landowners and black sharecroppers in post-World War II rural Mississippi. Based on the 2008 novel of the same name by Hillary Jordan, it spares none of the realities of the 1940s American South, showing the extreme racism of the time in chilling, often gory detail.
“Other studios were scared to touch it,” Rees said at the New York Film Festival last month, explaining why she ended up making it independently.
At the 90th Academy Awards, the film earned four nominations: Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Song for Blige, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Cinematography, the latter of which made Rachel Morrison the first woman ever nominated in the category.
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Over 1.5 billion people are affected by hearing loss.
TOGETHER (1956)
Directed by Lorenza Mazzetti
Two deaf-mute dock workers eke out a humble East End existence in Lorenza Mazzetti’s striking and poetic example of Free Cinema.
Italian director Lorenza Mazzetti borrowed techniques from the neorealist school to conjure this striking study of East End life, one of the original Free Cinema shorts. Following the ambling existence of two deaf-mute dock workers, Mazzetti crafts a poetic depiction of post-war London populated by unruly children, sparse bedsits and harsh realities.
With its minimal dialogue and focus on the everyday minutiae of working-class life, Together shared some stylistic similarities to the emerging documentary movement Free Cinema, but it was still the only narrative film included in the original Free Cinema programme as presented at the National Film Theatre in 1956.
Lorenza Mazzetti made her first film K in 1954 while studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. In 1956, with the support of the Slade and the BFI, she completed Together with fellow students Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi in the roles of the two deaf-mute dockworkers living in the still semi-destroyed London’s East End. Together was one of the films screened at the first Free Cinema event at the NFT in 1956. In line with Free Cinema’s focus on subjectivity and poetic freedom, Mazzetti’s films reject traditional cinematic conventions and give life to a fascinating combination of Neorealist practices, radical documentary cinema and ‘Kitchen Sink’ drama.
As a woman and a foreigner in a British male-dominated world, Lorenza Mazzetti’s early works open up many questions about the relationship between British and Italian avant-garde cinema in the 1950s.
Lorenza Mazzetti 1927-2020
As a woman and a foreigner in a British male-dominated world, Lorenza rly works open up many questions about the relationship between British and Italian avant-garde cinema in the 1950s.
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World Hearing Day is a campaign held each year by Office of Prevention of Blindness and Deafness of the World Health Organization. Activities take place across the globe and an event is hosted at the World Health Organization on March 3
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The WFD says “On World Hearing Day, Let’s #RememberToSign!”
