Film Hub Fortnightly – February
This February, one of the major events in the Northern Irish film calendar returns. WANDA: Feminism & Moving Image is a Belfast-based film programming organisation. Their annual festival seeks to introduce audiences to classic and contemporary works of cinema about and made by women, and to raise important questions about the history and treatment of gender in this medium. This year’s festival will be taking place online, from the 4th to the 7th, with a whole host of events.
The opening event will take place on the 4th and will be a Zoom Q&A with Ita O’Brien. She is the founder of Intimacy on Set, which assists film and TV productions in staging scenes of a sexual or intimate nature. On the 5th, there will be a free job-sharing panel discussion featuring guests from organisations Raising Films UK, Raising Films Ireland and NI Screen.
There will be a free screening of the BBC Arena documentary Putting Ourselves in the Picture (1987), which profiles photographer Jo Spence, and Purple Sea (2020), an experimental documentary following artist and co-director Amel Alzakout and other Syrian refugees as they attempt to travel across the Mediterranean. The 6th will start with an afternoon discussion on dance and film, with the day also including screenings informed by this theme.
This includes double bills from great avant-garde filmmakers Maya Deren and Mairead McClean. Moving Bodes, Moving Image is a programme of Irish dance films, while The Names Have Changed, Including My Own and Truths Have Been Altered (2020) is a short film from British-Nigerian filmmaker Onyeka Igwe. There will also be a rare chance to see Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), a feature from acclaimed American filmmaker and choreographer Yvonne Rainer.
The festival will then conclude on the 7th with a screening of Andrea Arnold’s acclaimed drama Fish Tank (2009) followed by the closing film Lingua Franca (2019), which follows a Filipino transwoman living in Brooklyn.
More information about the organisation and festival, including the films, talks and tickets (some events are accessible internationally while others are UK only, can be found at the WANDA website.
The Fermanagh Film Club continue their online Winter/Spring season on the 10th with Luxor (2020), a drama starring Andrea Riseborough as an aid worker who reconnects with an old lover while in the eponymous city.
Over on the QFT Player, you can watch The Capote Tapes (2019), a documentary featuring newly unearthed, candid interview tapes with the lauded and controversial author. Away (2019) is an animated adventure about a boy on a motorcycle fleeing from an evil spirit on a mysterious island, and The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s presents a conversation between Queen’s students and the Normal People (2020) and Room (2015) director Lenny Abrahamson.