Celebrating women in global cinema: curating a year-long programming initiative at HOME, Manchester

This paper will discuss our curation of Celebrating Women in Global Cinema (CWinGC), a unique year-long programming initiative that took place across 2019 (and into 2020) at HOME, Manchester. It begins by outlining HOME’s cinema offer, identifying how CWinGC emerged from the organisation’s clear and on-going commitment to the programming of work from women filmmakers from various socio-economic and geographical backgrounds. It then goes on to discuss the initial development of the idea of a year-long commitment to highlighting the contribution of women to the richness of global cinema rather than the more conventional season or month-long series of screenings and events. The paper then explores the key issues addressed when approaching the curation of such a large-scale project. In doing so identifying the over-arching themes and concerns that allowed for curatorial coherence across such a long programme of linked screenings, events and engagement activities. Finally, the paper then argues that, in its striving to offer an alternative to the more usual ‘short-term solution’ approach to more diverse programming, the approach to curating CWinGC offers something that can be seen as innovative within UK exhibition and offers a model that can be utilised across that sector in the future to address other gaps and omissions within the UK exhibition landscape