MWFF 2017

PANELISTS

BETWEEN 1975 AND TODAY: WHAT HAVE we LEARNED ABOUT WOMEN'S FILMMAKING?

LINDA BLAGG

Linda Blagg has been a practicing filmmaker since her twenties. In 1979, she wrote and directed Just Out of Reach starring Sam Neill. Since then, she has worked for Film Australia, ABC TV Drama and made over 100 educational docu-dramas for schools and universities, as well as many award-winning corporate commissions.

More recently, Linda has been working the area of multimedia, including a YouTube concept of ‘filmed portraits of the human spirit’. Linda achieved her PhD in Sustainability using digitally as her methodology and is Filmmaker in Residence at the CUSP Institute at Curtin University.

Linda’s short film Daddythings screened in the 1975 International Women’s Film Festival and appears in our Art & Life, Then & Now program.

ANNETTE BLONSKI

Annette Blonski is a freelance script editor of a number of award-winning feature films, shorts and documentaries including My Tehran for Sale, What I Have Written, and Eternity. She co-edited and co-wrote Don’t Shoot Darling! Women’s Independent Filmmaking in Australia and Shared Visions: Women in Television.

Annette was awarded a Script & Story Editing Fellowship in the AFC Distinctly Australian Program in 1996 and in 1999, won the WIFT Lottie Lyell Award for Outstanding Contribution to Screen Culture. She was a member of the Melbourne International Film Festival Board for 10 years, six of those as Deputy Chair, chaired the Industry Advisory Committee of the RMIT’s Associate Diploma of Professional Screenwriting and for 10 years was the Chair of Swinburne and then VCA School of Film and Television’s Industry Advisory Committee. She was a founding Member of the Board of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne and a founder member of the Natalie Miller Fellowship (NMF).

Annette’s film And Not Even Cry screened at the Melbourne International Women’s Film Festival 1975 and appears in our Art & Life, Then & Now program.

SUZANNE SPUNNER

Suzanne is a Playwright/Designer, Dramaturg and Critic. She writes on performance and on Contemporary Australian and Aboriginal Art.

She was a member of the Women's Theatre Group at the Pram Factory, the co-ordinator of 1975 International Women's Film Festival and the founding editor of LIP, a magazine about women in the visual and performing arts. She was a co-founder of Home Cooking Theatre Company in Melbourne and created Paradise Productions in Darwin to create and produce original Australian theatre  She has written some fourteen plays, which include, Not Still Lives, Running Up A Dress, Dragged Screaming to Paradise, Edna for the Garden and The Ingkata's Wife. She has also wrote and directed a drama documentary film, Tea and Pictures about the Australian artists Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor. 

Her recent PhD ‘Vindicating Rover Thomas’ developed a methodology for assessing the provenance of works attributed to the artist, which is applicable to other Australian Aboriginal artists. Her current research interests include investigating the origins and history of the East Kimberley art movement, and writing a book about Rover Thomas.  

victoria waghorn

Victoria Waghorn is a Sydney-based filmmaker and founder of art collective and filmmaking tribe, Punk Monk Propaganda. Victoria's 2007 short film, When Sally Met Frank, received international success winning Best Australian Film at the 2008 A Night of Horror International Film Festival and Best Experimental Film in New York and Los Angeles' HD FEST 2008. It was also a finalist at the 2007 Viscera Film Festival. In her follow up experimental short film, Mine Demon, Mine Own (2008), Victoria pays homage to the goddesses of the silent screen through a surreal exploration of her heroine's p

Victoria is currently making a feature length documentary, Ravishing Sleeping Beauty, which explores the normalisation of rape culture in our society and the resurrection of herstory through the reinvention of oral tradition. 

Victoria's films Chick Addict and Salome's Picnic appear in our Art & Life, Then & Now program.

Panel moderator:

Associate Professor Belinda Smaill (Monash University)

Associate Professor Belinda Smaill is head of Film and Screen Studies at Monash University. Her research encompasses women and cinema, Australian film and television and documentary film. She has been interested in the challenges faced by female film practitioners, and their work, since she studied filmmaking and fine arts in New  Zealand in the 1990s. Belinda is the author of The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (Palgrave, 2010), Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image (SUNY Press, 2016) and co-author of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (Lexington Books, 2013).