BEEF is delighted to welcome Lucy Reynolds and Irene Revell to host an evening of films for CINENOVA CHAIN LETTER. Through the process of a four-part chain letter, we explore Cinenova a unique feminist film distributor based in London with its origins in two pre-existing feminist organisations, Circles and Cinema of Women. Cinenova’s diverse archive includes experimental film, artists’ moving image, narrative feature films, documentary and educational videos made from the 1920s to the present. Themes include oppositional histories, post-colonial struggles, reproductive labour, representation of gender, race, sexuality and, importantly, the relations and alliances between these different struggles.

1) Our first film Serpent River is by Sandra Lahire (1989) and has been selected by BEEF member Laura Phillips. Each subsequent selector has been asked to respond to the previous choice and use this as an opportunity to explore the Cinenova catalogue.

2) The second film Women of the Rhondda by Esther Ronay, Mary Kelly, Mary Capps, Margaret Dickinson, Brigid Seagrave and Susan Shapiro (1972) has been co-selected by BEEF members Louisa Fairclough and Elisa Kay.

3) The third film She Said by Susan Stein (1982) has been selected by Lisa Brook and Lady Lucy of Independent Heroines.

4) The final film And What Does Your Mother Do? by Cine Mujer (1981) has been co-selected by our guest hosts Irene Revell and Lucy Reynolds.

Irene Revell is Director of Electra, an organisation that curates, commissions and produces projects by artists working across sound, moving image, performance and the visual arts. She is also a member of the Cinenova Working Group and Visiting Curator on the MA programme Sound Arts at London College of Communication.

Lucy Reynolds is an artist and writer interested in the generative power of the spaces, discourses and memories of feminism. She has lectured and published extensively, most particularly focused on questions of the moving image, feminism, political space and collective practice. She runs the MRES: Art Moving Image Course at St Martins in association with LUX.

Independent Heroines was a Bristol-based feminist film festival programmed around the theme of heroines; women who work, create and exist on their own terms, outside the narrow confines of what society says a woman can be. Themed events revealed inspirational figures past and present from such diverse fields as film, music, art, literature, burlesque dancing, radical cheerleading, skateboarding and politics.

Screening 7.30pm, doors 7pm

£3 entry