DYKES, CAMERA, ACTION! will be screening at this year’s Raindance Film Festival on 3rd October & 5th October (with Special Q&A)
DCA Films have announced that their documentary, DYKES, CAMERA, ACTION!, will be screening at this year’s Raindance Festival.
Lesbians didn’t always get to see themselves on screen. But between Stonewall, the feminist movement, and the experimental cinema of the 1970s, they built visibility, and transformed the social imagination about queerness. Filmmakers Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Rose Troche, Cheryl Dunye, Yoruba Richen, Desiree Akhavan, Vicky Du, film critic B. Ruby Rich, Jenni Olson, and others, share moving and often hilarious stories from their lives and discuss how they’ve expressed queer identity through film.
This feature-length documentary covers the history of queer cinema from the early days as a marginalised sub-culture, to the 1990s which saw the rise of New Queer Cinema, up to the present. The film examines the ways that women directors have contributed to this genre and emphasises the role that the media plays in representation of sexuality and gender, underscoring the power that film has to shape our perceptions of one another. Visually, this documentary comes to life on screen through compelling and intimate original interviews intercut with emotionally-charged archival footage, photographs, ephemera, inspired music, and film clips.
This documentary is not narrated; the filmmakers tell their own stories, blending personal experiences with a narrative about the evolution of lesbian cinema. DYKES, CAMERA, ACTION! brings together humour, pathos, and political / historical moments to form the film’s arc: the larger history of the gay liberation movements in the context of cinema.
