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.
Team Assistant at Birds’ Eye View
Birds Eye View are looking to recruit a highly motivated individual and self-starter who will play an important role in assisting with the Reclaim the Frame project and providing administrative support to the charity. This position gives the appointed candidate the chance to work across film events, communications and audience development, as part of an important programme affecting change and expanding the audience for films by women and non-binary people.
This is a Kickstart scheme vacancy meaning we are only able to consider applicants who are aged 16 to 24 years old who are currently claiming Universal Credit.
Contract:Fixed Term employmentHours:25 hours per week on average per month / to be worked flexibly across 4 days per weekTenure:6 monthsLocation:Anywhere in the UK / from home or from London officeReporting to:Director, working closely with the Birds’ Eye View team of 6Start Date:Monday 7th March 2022
*The working days per week will be decided between the employer and participant during the recruitment process based on what mutually works best for both parties.
HOURLY RATE OF PAY:
Living Wage (National or London, depending on where the participant is based)
LONDON BASED = £11.05 per hour – relevant insurance and minimum pension automatic enrolment contributions based on the participant’s age. Paid annual leave entitlement will be 8 days + public holidays over the course of the contract.
NON-LONDON BASED = £9.90 per hour – relevant insurance and minimum pension automatic enrolment contributions based on the participant’s age. Paid annual leave entitlement will be 8 days + public holidays over the course of the contract.
THE CHARITY:
Birds Eye View brings a wider perspective of the world by championing cinema by women & non-binary filmmakers.
Our mission is to advocate for equity, diversity, and inclusion in film by fostering a community for those who make, show, release and watch them.
We do this through:
Increasing the impact of, and developing the conversations around, films by women and non-binary people.
Increasing, developing, and diversifying audiences by making the cinema experience safe, accessible, relevant and inclusive.
Increasing equal access and opportunities within the film industry for women and non-binary people.
THE ROLE:
Support with the curatorial selection for Reclaim the Frame: sourcing screeners, viewing and feeding back on titles in consideration, and updating submissions database and release schedule working.
Support with the delivery of events: speaker research, drafting call sheets, making hospitality and accessibility arrangements.
Communications assistance as required: collating assets, researching community groups, and drafting/scheduling/issuing of social media and email copy.
Gathering and inputting audience survey data and assisting with the reporting of audience and online engagement working.
Administrative assistance: meeting arrangements, filing, data inputting, updating of website and online channels as required.
To be familiar with all relevant Health and Safety, operational, personnel, customer care, Data Protection and financial procedures.
The post-holder’s duties must at all times be carried out in compliance with Birds Eye View’s Equal Opportunities policy, ensuring equality of opportunity is afforded to all persons both internal and external to the organisation.
Predominantly home working with occasional (e.g. monthly) requirement to attend the office:
Studio 4, Vauxhall Gardens Community Centre, 5 Glasshouse Walk, London, SE11 5ES.
Regular opportunities to work on in-cinema events, depending on location.
We will consider all applicants regardless of their location.
If the successful applicant is based outside of London we will fund a few trips to the London office across the course of the placement. Travel expenses to field based work at cinemas will be reimbursed.
PERSON REQUIREMENTS:
Essential criteria:
All applicants must be 16 to 24 years old who are currently claiming Universal Credit (this will be verified).
Essential skills/abilities:
Good administration skills.
Experience of working with a team, including remotely.
Good communication skills, via phone, in person and over email.
Proactive approach to tasks.
Ability to work to deadlines, understanding how this impacts on team members.
Good organisational and time management skills.
Ability to work on own initiative and on a variety of tasks.
Passion for cinema and for equality, diversity and inclusion in cinema.
Desired skills/abilities:
A working knowledge of and interest in films by women (incl voluntary)
A working knowledge of film exhibition and distribution (theatrical or home entertainment – incl voluntary)
Experience in marketing: copy writing and using social media in a working environment (incl voluntary)
We recognise the value that can be brought to this role by somebody with lived experience of a diverse background. We particularly welcome applications from anyone who identifies as having one of the protected characteristics outlined in the Equality Act, or who has had experience of poverty, or hardship relevant to the experiences of those people we aim to serve..
To apply for the vacancy please contact your work coach at your jobcentre quoting the job vacancy ID: V0000392491 so they can refer you for the position on the system and submit your CV to mail@birds-eye-view.co.uk
All applications and referrals must be made by Monday 14th February.
Interviews will be held at Kennington Park JobCentre, London on Thursday 17th February.
For applicants not based in London, virtual interviews will take place on / around Thursday 17th February.
The appointment will be made by the end of February.
Predicated start date, Monday 7th March at latest
Equal Opportunities Statement:
Birds Eye View celebrates diversity and is committed to creating a fair and equal society, free from discrimination. You can read more about our commitment to inclusion and diversity here. We adhere to the BFI Diversity Standards which drive change and best practice in on screen representation and creative leadership, and we have representation targets for our work. We are also a London Living Wage Employer.
Safeguarding Statement:
Birds Eye View is committed to a safe recruitment process to help the organisation attract and appoint the right staff for the role and responsibilities as set out in the vacancy advert. We will not accept applicants who are not suitable to work with young people or adults at risk. If you have any questions around your suitability for this vacancy, please contact us as above.
The past is something of a lingering ghost in Memory Box – eager to be forgotten and left behind, equally insistent on being seen – poking its weary head through until, one day, it finds itself on the doorstep, both figuratively and literally, demanding to be dealt with once and for all.
Memory Box is filled with themes of memory, intergenerational trauma, and of how reconnecting with the past allows a mother and daughter to connect in the present. For teenage daughter Alex, and her mother Maia, the past is something that stands between them – presenting itself in the form of lies and secrets that run through Maia’s life – caused by the trauma of growing up during the Lebanese Civil War. Alex secretly yearns to know and understand her mother, so when a mysterious box appears on their doorstep, full of Maia’s old scrap books, cassettes and photos, Alex wastes no time searching through her mother’s past – desperate to unearth them.
Based on Joana Hadjithomas’ own adolescent experience of growing up in 1980’s Beirut, and the correspondence that took place between her and her best friend who fled to France. Throughout the film, her personal photos and diaries serve as archive of what she experienced in Lebanon during that period.
The film plays like a nostalgic daydream as Alex trawls through decades’ worth of correspondence between Maia and her childhood friend, Liza. She plays her mother’s old cassette tapes which narrates all that she finds. She listens to the 80’s music her mother used to dance to, delights in the photos of her mother smoking, kissing a boy in the back of a car, and finds joy in how alike they were at the same age.
As Alex delves deeper into her mother’s memories, she learns of the darkness in her mother’s young life. The things Alex takes for granted, the simple joys, freedoms, excitement and hedonism of being a teenager in the twenty-first century were all hard won for her mother during the war in Lebanon. A virtual prisoner of her protective parents, kept from leaving the house and seeing her friends and boyfriend, Maia writes in her journal that she doesn’t want to die a virgin, that she wants to travel and become a photographer. As Beirut collapses, bombs strike and chaos and disorder ensue, we watch the photos begin to disintegrate along with her mother’s passion for life. Alex’s grandmother notes, as Alex leaves the tap water running, the privilege of never having to worry about running out of water, or losing electricity. She never has to worry about her friends dying or going missing.
Alex’s own life begins to contrast to that of Maia’s as the film captures two wholly different generations. Memory Box does this in many ways, one being through a playful portrayal of technology. Text messages flutter on the screen and arrive in seconds as Alex tells her friends all about what she has discovered, whilst Maia wrote letters to her best friend overseas and sent her cassette recordings full of her thoughts and feelings. Maia captured her life on a film camera, while Alex captures and stores her life on her cell phone – a contemporary memory box. The physicality of the memories collected by Maia, sits in stark contrast to those of Alex’s, whose conversations are fleeting and intangible. Maybe this, in part, is why Maia struggles to let her daughter into the present, let alone the past. Maybe this is also why, when Maia discovers that Alex has been prying through her memory box, anger is quickly replaced with defeat and guilt.
Memory Box so beautifully captures the joy of hours spent looking through old family photos as well as the enlightening moment we come to realise the other lives lived by our parents before we were even conceived. Memories and the trauma within those memories that we did not belong to. Yet will come to know us eventually just as they do through the behavioural patterns of lies and secrecy that exist in Alex’s family. Memory Box traces the trauma that seeps through generations. We see it in Alex’s grandmother, flowing into Maia and then into Alex’s own life. The film feels especially pertinent to families, like my own, who have dealt with past trauma in their lives as it exposes the embedded sadness within Alex’s family and explores what navigating a life with a past full of ghosts looks like.
We learn of the killing of Maia’s little brother, and of the tragic death of her father, targeted for being a beacon of education and hope in Lebanon. His death sets off a wave of secrets and lies and ultimately a way to survive for Maia and her mother, but it is Alex who finally ends this generational curse by breaking the pattern and disrupting traditional familial hierarchies by becoming a friend and ally to her mother.
Hadjithomas creates a sense of equality between Maia and Alex, going beyond the mother/daughter dynamic, as Alex becomes friends with the girl she finds in the memory box. We see something similar In Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman when both mother and daughter become the same age (8 years old) the dynamic changes between them and, like in Memory Box, they become friends and peers, sharing the same fears, dreams and desires.
Alex’s curiosity and yearning to connect and share her mother’s memories, pushes Maia to reflect, to remember, and, ultimately, to go back to the past, and return to Lebanon with the support of her daughter. There she meets her old friends, her long-lost first love, and a country she once knew – now rebuilt, much like the relationship between mother and daughter.
In an interview with The Guardian, Hadjithomas, resolutely notes: “We lived violent things, but art led us out of it. We didn’t let the ghosts fill our life.”
Elise Hassan is a writer, programmer and curator, passionate about championing women-led Middle Eastern and North African cinema.
Her favourite films include Mustang, Spirited Away and Goodbye First Love!
Twitter @EliseHa_
For more about Elise, click HERE
BRIEF FOR A COMMISSIONED ARTICLE
The Souvenir Part II
By Joanna Hogg
RECLAIM THE FRAME X THE SOUVENIR PART II
Deadline for pitch: midday on Friday 28 January 2022
We would like to invite a written response to THE SOUVENIR PART II (directed by Joanna Hogg) from an early career UK based film writer / curator / critic / poet.
Your article will be a reflexive and creative response to the film, or take the form of an opinion piece, ideally incorporating a short review. We’re looking for fresh perspectives on the film and the lead subjects from working-class females and non-binary people of any age. We don’t want to sanctify the work, but need to be mindful we are supporting The Souvenir Part II.
THE SOUVENIR PART II
In the aftermath of her tumultuous relationship with a charismatic and manipulative older man, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) begins to untangle her fraught love for him in making her graduation film, sorting fact from his elaborately constructed fiction. Joanna Hogg’s shimmering story of first love and a young woman’s formative years, The Souvenir Part II is a portrait of the artist that transcends the halting particulars of everyday life — a singular, alchemic mix of memoir and fantasy. With an outstanding cast that also includes Richard Ayoade, Charlie Heaton, Joe Alwyn and Tilda Swinton, the critically acclaimed sequel to The Souvenir is a truly unmissable cinematic event.
Now in its 18th year, BIRDS’ EYE VIEW continues to spotlight, celebrate and create impact for films by women and non-binary people while building a community for those who make, show, release and watch them.
RECLAIM THE FRAME aims to re-tell the story of cinema by drawing ever greater audiences to films by women & non-binary creatives, and re-claim cinema as a truer reflection of the world we live in. Find out more about the project HERE.
Details
Writer Fee: £150
This is to include a short review as part of a wider feature (which also includes the interview)
Applicants will be UK based film writers / curators / critics and will deliver the finished work to Birds’ Eye View by the deadline below.
Timeline
Deadline for applications: midday on Friday 28 January
Successful applicant notified by Monday 31 January at the latest.
Date for the article to be delivered will be no later than Monday 7 February
Date for publication no later than Wednesday 9 February
To apply
To apply please send the following to Birds’ Eye View – mail@birds-eye-view.co.uk with the subject heading:
Birds’ Eye View x The Souvenir Part II
Proposal (max 1 A4 page – attached as a PDF – not in the body of the email) including what you would like to do, how it engages with the brief, examples of past writing (links preferred) together with the lived experience you bring to your work, how you intend to create and deliver your idea along with a link to your portfolio/cv, website and social media handles.
Notes to Applicants:
Engaging creative and representative individuals is a vital part of the RECLAIM THE FRAME project. We are therefore committed to ensuring the best candidates are appointed for this project, we welcome and encourage applications from individuals from all backgrounds, including under-represented groups.
Reclaim The Frame is funded by the BFI, awarding funds from The National Lottery.
