Women & Film Under Communism: A Report from the Archive

Funded by the Leverhulme Trust Fellowship 2015/2016, this project aimed at recovering, systematising and promoting the creativity of Polish women who under communism worked at the Documentary Film Studio in Warsaw. The website offers a unique showcase of the most successful female directors from the era. It gives the user free access to their full profiles and descriptions of their films--all accompanied by archive photographs and a small selection of documentary footage. This work formed the first-ever attempt at writing female-specific history of Polish documentary film. Its completion was preceded by a year-long investigation at the National Film Archive in Warsaw, where the author collated information from often uncatalogued sources. To date, the history of the presented films and their award-wining directors have been marginalised by film historians because both in Poland and abroad critics and scholars typically favoured male filmmakers, such as Kieślowski, Karabasz, Łoziński and others. The author intended to grant international visibility to these prolific but forgotten women filmmakers. As a female-focussed, open-access English-language resource, not only does the website present detailed factual info, but also short analytical articles on historical contexts of the described films along with a full list of available English- and Polish-language sources on the subject. The overall word-count adds to circa 60 000 words. The project received encouraging feedback from feminist scholars, historians and filmmakers. This was first obtained during conferences, such as ‘Doing Women’s Film and Television History IV’ `(Southampton, 2018), Visible Evidence (Buenos Aires, 2017) and Women’s Presentations (Wroclaw, 2018). Later, it generated much interest among the film community in Poland where it was cited to provide unprecedented historical role models for women working in the Polish film industry today