When my book Reframing Women: A history of New Zealand cinema (Harper Collins) was published in 2000 New Zealand women's film was flourishing. There had been an explosion of filmmaking following the upsurge of twentieth century feminism in the 1970s beginning with the international women's year film Some of My Best Friends are Women (1975) and the subsequent production of nine feminist documentary films. The energy generated by these films and the international feminist history projects that uncovered the formerly invisible contribution of women across every sphere of creative was contagious. There was a feeling of optimism that anything was possible. Women were using the camera to focus the lens on themselves and their issues. Between 1980 and 1990 dramas and features dealing with gender issues increased dramatically while the formerly marginalised were gaining access to the technology to explore sexuality and identity politics. There were powerful films about identity by Maori, Pacific, Asian, Yugoslavian, Greek … and increasing experimentation with film form.

Since 2000 women have lost ground and film production and experimentation has declined, knocked back by the backlash against feminism, by recession and fiscal cutbacks caused by the global financial meltdown of 2008–9 and a change in political parties to a conservative, misogynist, right wing, capitalist government. I propose to investigate the situation and the changes in the film climate with reference to the global situation through a series of interviews with key creatives: leading feminist film director Gaylene Preston, academic documentary film director Annie Goldson, feature film directors Christine Jeffs (Rain and Sylvia about Sylvia Plath) and Fiona Samuel (Bliss about the life of Katherine Mansfield), the Greek feminist academic film director Athina Tsoulis, Maori screenwriter Riwia Brown (Once Were Warriors), Samoan director Justine Simei-Barton, Indian academic Schuchi Kotari and the cinematographer Mairi Gunn, along with a younger feminist director Brita McVeigh.

The paper will compare my historical findings in reframing women with the current situation in a blend of history, current opinion and analysis and reflection.

This essay examines reflexive strategies in three contemporary Hindi-language feature films directed by women, Om Shanti Om (2007), Luck By Chance (2008), and Dhobi Ghat/Mumbai Diaries (2010). These Mumbai-set films, directed and written by Farah Khan, Zoya Akhtar, and Kiran Rao, respectively, offer insider industry perspectives and a variety of outlooks on Bollywood and Indian society more generally. I introduce the concepts of “selective reflection” to critically examine self-conscious representations of the excessively star-driven world of Bollywood filmmaking in an age of globalization (and the dominant figure of the male hero), directing styles and strategies of image-making, and the blurred boundaries between reality and artifice. This article presents a close analysis of narrative tropes (especially “breaking in” to Bollywood), filmi references, casting, spectator dynamics, and gendered agency in films that represent a taxonomic range from commercial blockbuster to art cinema.

In her 2011 documentary, La Langue de Zahra/Zahra's Mother Tongue, Algerian/French filmmaker Fatima Sissani “gives voice” to her Kabyle mother, Zahra, who lived in France as an immigrant woman for years after Algerian independence without speaking French. Often considered uneducated and ignorant, these women act as archives of oral tradition, history, and poetry in a language their children often do not speak. In this paper, I will look at how this performative documentary film creates “spaces in-between” cultures through its uses of performance, orality, and cinematic space. A number of recent Maghrebi and sub-Saharan African documentaries have emerged that can be described as performative documentaries in which historical evocation and emotive connection to the subject matter is as important to the filmmaker as factual referencing. The filmmaker plays a self-reflexive role in the text, which often shapes the content.

It is important to note that the film is not about being forced to choose between two geographical locations, and it does not seek to hybridize two cultures, but rather is concerned with other sorts of questions such as the nature of Berber culture and language, how it impacts not only the representation of Algeria's post-Independence history (the troubled context of the 1990s, the history of Algerian migration to France), but also the practice and aesthetics of this contemporary documentary filmmaker. The film suggests possible new ways of looking at questions of minority language (Kabyle), culture, and identity that could potentially greatly contribute to the understanding of contemporary independent documentary film practices, discourses, and aesthetics.

This paper examines how, building on earlier filmic representations such as Ousmane Sembene's La Noire de… and Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako, Khady Sylla's Le Monologue de la muette traces a continuum of women's exploitation, from slavery to colonization to globalization.

The ubiquity of gender-bending and sexually ambiguous imagery in the media seems to herald a post-gay era. But are LGBT/Q identities and representation politics really a thing of the past? Inspection of the circulation patterns of LGBT/Q images on a global scale suggests a more nuanced story. Taking the lead from distribution and film festival studies, in this essay I sketch out how LGBT/Q images travel around the world. The festival network was always an alternative channel to mainstream work. Therefore, I pay particular attention to the international film festival circuit with its art film bias, on one hand, and activist festivals, such as LGBT/Q film festivals and their LGBT/Q-themed films, on the other. Utilizing Lisa Henderson's notion of “queer relay” I argue that the relationship between the queer film ecosystem and the larger art film circuit is highly ambivalent. The deployed art film strategies reveal that we have not yet arrived at actual acceptance and universality in a post-gay, post-identitarian world. However, the positions on the side of distinction and cultural capital do not just lean towards exploitation of queer subcultural productions by neoliberal forces but offer also a relay position that accounts for queer agency in the wider cultural arena.

Latin American women's filmmaking has an unprecedented international profile thanks to the films of the Peruvian director Claudia Llosa, and the Argentine directors Lucía Puenzo and Lucrecia Martel. What is frequently unacknowledged when discussing the work of these award-winning filmmakers is the fact that all of their films are co-productions with Europe, and that programmes such as Cinéfondation, a programme aligned with the Cannes film festival, the Hubert Bals Fund, the World Cinema Fund and Ibermedia have been instrumental in their production. This article will tell this story through a discussion of the work of Claudia Llosa with an introduction to the issues raised by her award winning festival film Madeinusa (2006), and a focus on La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow (2009). It will consider the arguments of theorists who critique what they see as neo-colonial European interventions in ‘world cinema’, and those who celebrate the enabling work of the funding bodies. The chapter asks where can we place the cultural production of Llosa within these paradigms? Does the film confirm the critical positions by being subject to a process of othering for a European cinephile festival audience? Does it create its protagonist Fausta, an Andean migrant to Lima, from racist, neo-colonial stereotypes as some critics claim? Or, does it raise important questions relating to class and ethnic divisions within contemporary Peruvian society? The article ends with a discussion of how Llosa's second film, that presents the urban poor and the colonial class from a bourgeois point of view, compares with the films of Lucrecia Martel and Lucía Puenzo which provide a bourgeois point of view on the bourgeoisie itself.

Since the financial success of the American remake of a Japanese horror film called Ringu (Hideo Nakata 1998), remaking a well-accepted Asian scary film in its domestic or pan-Asian market has been a recurring phenomenon in the American film industry for the past decade. The particular style of horror films which this article identifies as the “New Asian Female Ghost Films” has been the most welcomed Asian genre for the Hollywood project for reworking Asian cinematic originals. Beyond the commonality in narrative and thematic sharing, the New Asian Female Ghost Films are characterized as the specific iconography of the monstrous feminine with other gendered/gendering imageries and imaginations to reflect as well as the countries’ long traditions of female ghost filmmaking and the changed socio-cultural matrixes.

Childhood innocence has often been treated by scholars as an empty, idealised signifier. This article contests such accounts, arguing that innocence is best regarded as a powerfully unmarked training in heternormativity, alongside class and race norms. This claim will be demonstrated through attention to two recent films addressing childhood: Celine Sciamma's Tomboy and P.J. Hogan's Peter Pan. The films characterise young femininity as an ‘impossible space’, in which subjects face the contradictory, schizoid demands to simultaneously show both childhood innocence and heteronormative femininity – or else face the threat of a spoiled identity. The plot of each film traces how the protagonist attempts to manoeuvre in the face of and precisely using this contradiction. In dramatising such manoeuvring, the films reveal the surprising forms of subjectivity (e.g. the tomboy) that can be inhabited for a time in the interstices between age and gender norms, and which might have lasting value. Both films thus dramatise how an interstitial space can offer possibilities for negotiating the terms under which a subject is inserted into dominant, recognisable forms of subjectivity.