We Are Doc Women present three shorts themed around history, archives and memory:
The Archive: Queer Nigerians (Simisolaoluwa Akande, 25’, 2023)
The Veiled City (Natalie Cubides-Brady, 13’, 2024)
The Ban (Roisin Agnew, 30’, 2024)
The screenings will be followed by a Q&A with the film’s directors. The Q&A will be hosted by Hannah Bush Bailey (Doc Society), and we would like to invite all attendees to join us for drinks in The Garden bar after the screening.
Synopsis:
The Archive: Queer Nigerians (Simisolaoluwa Akande, UK, 25’, 2023)
Following five queer Nigerians living in the UK as they document their lives through audio diaries. From childhood to the present, participants share stories that explore how universal ideas of family, love, and finding oneself are obfuscated within the intersection of Blackness, African-ness, and Queerness.
The Veiled City (Natalie Cubides-Brady, UK, 13’, 2024)
A sci-fi city symphony inspired by London's Great Smog of 1952. Created from archive footage, the film unfolds through fictional letters from a post-apocalyptic future. The film invites us to understand the smog in the context of the present-day climate emergency and our global destiny.
The Ban (Roisin Agnew, Ireland, 30’, 2024)
The Ban, powerfully utilizes archival material to revisit the UK's broadcasting ban from 1988 to 1994. The film explores a period when actors voiced Sinn Fein figures to circumvent the ban on their actual voices, deemed too dangerous for public broadcast. Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher defended the ban as a means to deny terrorists "the oxygen of publicity." The documentary includes a comedic 1994 sketch by Chris Morris and Steve Coogan, where a ‘republican spokesperson’ inhales helium.
About We Are Doc Women
WADW Presents is a series of documentary screenings with Q&As with the women creatives behind the camera. It comes from the team behind We Are Doc Women, a group that was founded in 2017 to provide peer support for women directors working in factual television in the UK. We have grown to become a collective of directors, producers, assistant producers and executive producers advocating for equal opportunities, greater support and fair recognition within our industry.