James S. Williams: I’d like to begin by asking you please to introduce yourself, Selina.¹

Selina Robertson: I am a queer feminist film researcher, programmer, curator, interested in feminist and lgbtq film exhibition, histories and archives. This has been the focus of my PhD, which I completed in December 2023 at Birkbeck, University of London, in the Film, Media and Cultural Studies department.² This research has come out of my work as a film programmer in the British film industry since the mid-’90s. Working at the British Film Institute, The Film Council, and the Independent Cinema Office, I have been advising independent cinemas and multi-arts venues across the United Kingdom on ways of expanding the range of cinema their audiences watch, with a focus on showing international and British cinema, documentary, artists’ film, archive, repertory and short films. In tandem with this programming work I have been curating with Club des Femmes, a queer feminist curating collective I co-founded in 2007 with Sarah Wood. Sarah and I set up Club des Femmes because we wanted to watch the full richness of feminist and queer experimental films in the cinema with our friends. I’d been programming at bfi Flare (then called the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival),³ and Sarah had been programming at the Cambridge Film Festival. We wanted to be more light-footed and responsive, to have the opportunity to program films and filmmakers we loved that had disappeared from the cinema. So we set up a film club. I can’t quite believe that we are still going all these years later. The collective has since expanded to now include So Mayer, Ania Ostrowska, Jenny Clarke and, most recently, Helen De Witt.

JW: How did your work with Club des Femmes lead you to research the history of queer feminist film programming and curation?

SR: It was about nine years ago that I became interested in doing some research on Club des Femmes’s prehistory in London. I remember when we started Club des Femmes I had no idea (with the exception of Cinenova) that there was a long history of feminist film programming groups and lesbian and gay film festivals and events in London that had been doing programming and curating work – activist and advocacy work which mirrored our own. In 2011 I had completed an ma in Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck. Laura Mulvey was my tutor and I had stayed in touch with her, so it made sense to return to Birkbeck to do this piece of research. I was going to research the feminist film exhibition histories of women’s film festivals in the 1970s and then look at the programming histories at bfi Flare in the 1980s and 1990s. I was told my terrain was too broad. In 2016, Club des Femmes was programming a weekend of film screening and events at the Rio Cinema, a community cinema in East London where we had been curating screenings and events since 2012. Over the weekend, we remembered and revived the legacy of the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common, re-positioning the camp as a transnational and intersectional space (1980–2000).⁴ Greenham is usually remembered through a documentary called Carry Greenham Home, by Beeban Kidron and Amanda Richardson, and as such its history is thought of through the lens of White feminism. Drawing on Sasha Roseneil’s research, where she positions Greenham as a queer feminist space,⁵ we have always tried to push back against this dominant history. In the course of that weekend, we discovered ephemera at the Rio dating back to the late 1970s and 1980s which revealed women’s film and video programming collectives who were programming feminist and lesbian video and film screenings and events (Fig. 1).

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The Rio Cinema, Dalston, in the 1980s.

Citation: Studies in World Cinema 5, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26659891-bja10054

courtesy of rio cinema archive.

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I remember coming across a flyer for a “Gay Pride Week” film festival from 1980 held at the Rio. I was astonished to discover we were part of a long line of feminist and lesbian and gay film programming at the Rio. So this chance discovery instigated my PhD research. I felt compelled to excavate the archive at the Rio and to find out more about this elided history of community-based feminist and lgbt film programming. Also, I wanted more people to know about this history. It was at this time that thousands of 35mm glass mounted slides were found in a filing cabinet in the basement of the Rio, material that documented Hackney’s social and cultural life in the 1980s. From that discovery came this amazing book, The Rio Tape/Slide Archive.⁶ The 35mm slides were taken by a photography community group called the Tape/Slide Newsreel Group which grew out of Centerprise, the radical community bookshop on Kingsland High Street (opposite the Rio) and the Hackney Adult Education Institute.⁷ The Tape/Slide group would meet in the basement of the Rio. Some of the women in the group went to Greenham to document the protests at the camp, and they and others in the group recorded also the anti-capitalist, anti-nuclear and women’s protests in Hackney during the 1980s. Spending time in the archive and looking through the slides, I found out about the work of two women’s programming groups, the Women’s Media Resource Project and Rio Women’s Cinema Group. My PhD came out of these revelations in the archive.

JW: When you say archive, was it set up originally as an archive in the ’80s to conserve material that would be used perhaps later on? Or was it something that was found and then reclaimed as an archive? How does the archive work in this case?

SR: The 35mm slides were labeled with names and dates, so the material had been catalogued; whoever was working at the Rio at the time knew that this material needed to be kept, that it was important and of value. But the material had never been digitized and (as far as I know) studied as an archive. In terms of the paper archive, this material was scattered across the building, in the basement, the attic, the projection room, and the staff offices. The documentation consisted of flyers, posters, production stills, agm s, annual reports, letters, press clippings, and notes. And then, of course, there were the memories held by my participants and audiences of that time. Robert Rider, who together with Ramsay Cameron programmed the Rio in the 1980s, donated his paper archive to the Dalston C.L.R. James Library. So there is a complete record of the Rio’s film programming in the 1980s. But I think this material only tells you so much. When studied through a queer and feminist framework a different narrative emerges about feminist and lgbt film programmers who fostered a dynamic intersectional film culture at the Rio. Spending more time in the archive, I knew I had to speak to the women who were organizing and producing these film and video screenings and events and hear in their own words what had gone on at the Rio and the grassroots programming work they were doing that was creating this new feminist and lesbian film culture.

JW: So your thesis is based around interviews with those people?

SR: Yes, undertaking this oral history work was one aspect of the research. Conceptually, it was about trying to reconstruct a history out of absence, loss and ruination. I tried to get in touch with as many of the women who were involved in these two groups as possible. It was hard. There were women whose work had been forgotten, names misspelt or left out. Some had moved abroad. Some didn’t want to participate because it was so long ago. For example, the feminist film programming group Rio Women’s Cinema existed for a couple of years in the early 1980s. One of the group’s founding members is now living in Europe. She declined to participate in my research, but I managed to speak with a few women who still live in Hackney who were part of that group. In the case of the Women’s Media Resource Project, it was set up as a grassroots intersectional feminist group which trained women in sound and video to get jobs in the media. It was a women-only media resource. Part of that work was organizing film and video screenings and community-based events. I managed to get in touch with quite a few women who were part of the group and interview them. These interviews are incorporated into a new archive that I was reconstructing, through practice as research and a form of cultural and collective memory. I invited my participants to return to the Rio and share their memories and experiences. At the beginning of 2020 I began a curatorial project called “We Want You: Feminist Re-Imaginings at the Rio 1980–2020.”⁸ I realized that a lot of the cinema workers at the Rio were interested to find out what had gone on at the Rio in the 1980s, especially the queer film screenings and events. I had a plan to invite them along too, to bring them into the conversation as well, which would have been interesting and productive. Unfortunately the project was canceled because of covid, so I had to re-configure my practice in a different way. But I had done the interviews already thankfully, and that oral history was submitted as part of my PhD. This year, I would like to do more with that oral history because it is an amazing resource in itself, an archive within an archive – for some of my participants it was the first time they had spoken about that time in their younger lives.

JW: Do you think there will be ever a film about the Rio, like the new documentary Scala!!! which presents the Scala cinema in King’s Cross as a subversive, queer space?

SR: The Rio’s archivist and historian, Andrew Woodyatt and I have spoken about making a film about the Rio’s radical film histories for some time. Andrew co-edited The Rio Tape/Slide Archive. He’s running a weekly queer film night at the Rio at the moment called “Pink Palace” that’s doing really well.⁹ A film about the Rio is something we want to make happen: we both decided we’re probably the best people to do that because we are both passionate about keeping the many histories of the Rio alive and we care about the cinema’s archive. A lot of the people who were the founders of the Rio Centre are getting older, their memories are fading – we need their memories documented and shared.

JW: It would be a very different sort of film, wouldn’t it, just because of the nature of the Rio and the role it played within the community, in a way that I’m not sure the Scala did. The Rio was very much about the community in a very mixed urban setting. And Dalston was also pretty poor at the time. How important is it for you that it’s here, in East London?

SR: Since the end of the nineteenth century, the East End has had a long association with migration. Diverse, creative and exciting, East London is home to incredible stories and memories, many of which constellate around the Rio. I serve on the board at the Rio, and every time I go there I find it amazing that the cinema is still standing all these years after.¹⁰ The original building was an auctioneer’s shop owned by a pioneering businesswoman called Clara Ludski. In 1909 Clara converted the shop into one of London’s very first cinemas, which she named the Kingsland Palace of Animated Pictures. But in the 1970s times were very tough: Hackney was poor, unemployment was high, people started to leave the borough, and whole streets became derelict. Before the Rio reopened in 1979 as the Rio we know today, it was actually a porn cinema called the Tatler Cinema Club. There is a brilliant story that I love to tell about this time in the history of cinema. There was a burlesque dancer called Sizzling Samantha who would come to the Tatler from the West End. She had a python that used to sleep on the projector to keep warm. Before her routine, she would run up two flights into the projector booth, collect her python, then run back on stage to do her Vegas-style burlesque show. Out of this history, and many histories before, came the Rio.

In 1977, a group of local activists, writers, artists and community organizers formed a working group to reimagine – and make happen – the Rio as a cinema where local community groups could participate in the programming. The Rio was set up as a cultural center, a place of entertainment, as well as a resource and refuge. It was very much connected with Centerprise and a lot of the meetings about setting up the Rio took place there. My participants who were programming feminist and lesbian screenings and events would impress on me the particular social and political contexts that the Rio was operating in. A cultural history of the Rio and its locality is documented in The Rio Tape/Slide Archive. The Rio was at the epicenter of Hackney’s community activism and cultural politics.¹¹ One of the women who set up the Rio was Christine Jackson who came from working with Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal in Stratford. Littlewood wanted to make theater accessible for everyone in the community. Christine’s wish was for the Rio to have the same ethos: that anyone could come to the Rio at any point during a month and there would be something for everyone. It was this new concept of a community cinema which came to be defined by the Rio and the Ritzy [in Brixton] – they were the first independent cinemas in London to cultivate and practice those ideas. The Rio has obviously changed, but it remains independent and embedded within the local community. You can’t separate the history of the cinema from the politics of the time within the locality of Hackney in the 1980s. These stories and memories shaping life in Hackney were reflected in the screenings and events at the Rio.

JW: To what degree was the community in the ’70s and into the ’80s in Dalston a queer community?

SR: Histories of the queer community in Dalston at this time have been hard to find but they are there. When I came across the Rio’s first “Gay Pride Week,” it was hard to find out who the organizers were, as there were no programming credits on the flyer. I got in touch with Richard Dyer and asked him if he knew of the festival or any of the organizers. I went to him because he had co-programmed the first gay and lesbian film season at the National Film Theatre in 1977, “Gays and Film,” with Caroline Sheldon. He didn’t know, but commented it was a shame that these types of gay and lesbian film festival histories are getting lost. Right now, there’s some really interesting archival research happening through a trans curatorial screening series called “TGirlsonFilm.”¹² There’s a young trans programmer, historian and researcher, called Jaye Hudson, who actually works at the Rio. Jaye is undertaking a really interesting curatorial historiography project with the poet, writer, and trans activist Roz Kaveney. An original member of the Gay Liberation Front (glf), Roz’s history in Hackney, squatting in a trans commune, was captured recently on “The radical history of Hackney” website project.¹³ Jaye is doing this restoration work with Roz about her life in London in the 1970s and her experience of the glf and trans community and culture at the time. I also found out that Broadway Market and the area around London Fields was busting with lesbian and women-only squats. There’s a story that Baader-Meinhof founding member Astrid Proll escaped to London in 1974, changed her name and identity, came out as a lesbian, and lived in one of the Broadway Market squats as well as elsewhere in Hackney. In interviews she has mentioned support from feminists, squatters and Hackney members of the liberation Marxist group Big Flame. Christine Wall, who was there, has done some amazing research about the women’s squats in Hackney in the ’70s, which I drew on for my research.¹⁴ In addition, some of my participants had lived in mixed or women-only squats near Victoria Park in the ’80s. I also found a flyer in the archive that evidences the presence of the glf in Hackney from the 1980s. There was a gay/queer squat in Hackney called the Amersham Commune, which was a safe space for the glf to operate in. I have also been able to find out about a history of Dalston’s queer communities from digging about in the Rio archive, which reveals a history of women-only, lesbian and gay film programming throughout the 1980s. In fact, the Women’s Media Resource Project’s film and video programming instigated discussion around many of the hot feminist and lesbian debates of the 1980s around sex and gender.

JW: It’s my understanding that it was very much gay men who decamped from the center to Brixton and set up squats, whereas in the case of Dalston it was more women, feminists and trans activists. So the fact that there is all this which has yet to be fully uncovered, and that your work is going to help achieve it, is remarkable.

SR: One of my participants is viv acious. viv was on the board of the wmrp; she was also a dj, compere, sound engineer and fabulous dyke-about-town. Last year, viv told me about a stash of vhs tapes in her house. There’s a pub very near to the Rio called the Duke of Wellington, which was a popular lesbian space in the ’80s and ’90s. viv explained that she filmed a lot of the lesbian and women-only bands who played at the pub. There’s still so much queer and lesbian material history that needs to be recovered, documented and digitized for the future.

When I began my research I tried to get funding to digitize some of the videos that had been shown at the First National Women’s Video Festival in 1987 – this was a festival initiated and co-programmed by the Women’s Media Resource Project and many others. I had this idea of reconstructing a cultural and collective memory of the festival at the Rio by rescreening a selection of these tapes. It was extremely difficult to track down some of the women who were involved with the festival. Many of them had abandoned working in the media and had gone onto other careers. When I was successful, I realized that much of the material was disintegrating or had disintegrated – the tapes had not been digitized, and the screening formats were on the cusp of being obsolete, certainly in terms of their potential to be exhibited in a cinema. I was unable to get funding, but I have not forgotten about this festival and the cultural practice surrounding it. This is very urgent: these tapes keep a record from that time, a historical memory of 1980s lesbian and feminist moving image culture. This has consequences not only for historiography and the national archive, but also for London’s queer cultural memory. Dagmar Brunow has done a lot of research in this area.¹⁵

JW: You talked earlier about Greenham Common as a transnational space. Is that also how you saw the Rio during this period, and maybe its evolution – as both a local setting within East London, and very specifically Dalston, and a transnational political setting?

That’s a snapshot of cultural work at the Rio in the ‘80s in terms of its strong connection with local and global communities.

JW: How do queer and feminism come together exactly? I mean, in terms of Greenham Common, it was a major step forward for British feminism, and international, as you say. Was it also a queer movement?

SR: We [Club des Femmes] have always advocated for Greenham being a queer feminist space. I mentioned before Sasha Roseneil: she went to Greenham when she was sixteen as a young lesbian. In 2016, she came to the Rio and spoke about the camp being a queer feminist space, and a woman stood up and said rubbish, it wasn’t! Afterwards, Sasha explained she gets that response all the time. She had a brilliant answer, explaining that because the women at Greenham challenged traditional values, politics and lifestyles, this in fact signaled a bold step forward for queer feminist politics. We knew about the Blue Gate which was known as the lesbian gate out of the nine gates around the camp. We also say that we don’t know who was there. There might have been trans women, bisexual women, as well as lesbian and heterosexual women. We prefer to stay away from binary, fixed categories. I like to use Ann Cvetkovich’s writing – she keeps queer and feminism connected to resist any presumption that they are mutually exclusive.¹⁹

Greenham sits between the queer and the lesbian, not occupying either category comfortably. We get why a lot of women want to hold on to one fixed idea about Greenham because their histories and identities continue to be erased and marginalized. But for us it’s about passing down the tactics, knowledge, creativity and, of course, memories about Greenham to the next generation. And for that generation it’s important to hear that Greenham was a queer feminist space. I grew up next door to Greenham, and I always remember driving by one of the gates and the women singing, shouting, protesting. Witnessing another way of living made a big impression on me, even as the right-wing press spat out hysterical and derogatory headlines and lurid stories. When we show films about Greenham, which we did last week at Tate Britain,²⁰ young audiences want to learn why Greenham was an inclusive, open place (Fig. 2).

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Club des Femmes x Women in Revolt!: “Every Liberation Struggle Brings Us Nearer To Peace.” Banner for Tate Britain, London. 21 February 2024.

Citation: Studies in World Cinema 5, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26659891-bja10054

courtesy of club des femmes archive.

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It is important to keep feminist with queer as a curatorial endeavor too, because feminist curation is about collective, intersectional, decolonial, intergenerational work that is knowledge production. Linked with this, I love Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s idea of queerness as an open mesh of possibilities: queer as something that is troubling, eddying and circular, you can’t quite hold on to it. I also draw on B. Ruby Rich who has been involved in film culture as curator, critic and editor for decades, who has always held those two intersecting spaces within her curatorial and writing work.

JW: As a collective Club des Femmes gets rid of any binary or any kind of crisis around lesbian or queer. It’s a very artful title, isn’t it, Club des Femmes, depending on how you pronounce it as well.

SR: Thank you for saying this! We love being artful even if it happened by accident. You know, the French film from 1936, Club de Femmes, by Jacques Deval. This film had one of the earliest cinematic presentations of lesbianism.

JW: Yes, it’s a groundbreaking commercial film about women’s desires and struggles.

SR: When we were thinking about our logo and marketing materials, how we wanted to present ourselves to the world, Sarah accidentally misspelt our name. We became a women’s club in the plural. We thought, let’s keep it, we like it, and, as you say, depending on how you pronounce us, we become different things – very Sedgwick! Also, at the time we were obsessed with the films of Sadie Benning, Vivienne Dick and Lizzie Borden. In our naming, we were responding to that work which was so punk, feminist, and queer.

JW: Are you saying that that moment of co-founding was in reaction to normativity within the lesbian/gay London scene?

SR: I think that we both had the feeling of being restricted in our ideas in the programming jobs that we were doing at the time. I remember there was an issue about writing copy: there was certain language I could not use because of the sponsors. I felt I was being censored. I didn’t want to work in that homonormative space anymore.

JW: OK. Do you recall when the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival reinvented itself and became bfi Flare lgbtqia+?

SR: We spoke about expanding the term when I was co-programming the festival in the early 2000s. But I think the bfi changed the identity of the festival to Flare: London lgbt Film Festival in 2014 under the leadership of Tricia Tuttle, who is now the new Director of the Berlinale. It was at that point that Flare launched a new programming style with the creation of themed film strands (“Hearts,” “Bodies,” and “Minds”). This followed the new programming categories at the London Film Festival. Quite a few programmers at the London Film Festival left because of that decision. I remember, a few years after we started Club des Femmes, there was a funding crisis at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival – the festival was at risk, and the East London film and arts festival Fringe! came out of that moment.²¹ Fringe! was set up by Muffin Hix and Alex Karotsch, and over the years we have been invited to guest curate screenings and events. It has been a very rewarding collaboration. We have a kinship and connection with Fringe! which champions historical and contemporary queer moving image experimentation. Like us, they use the cinema as a space of resistance, solidarity, and community.

JW: We are talking then about a particular community. What is it about East London that makes this possible?

SR: The East End community has always been diverse, resilient, and resourceful. In the 1970s, a lot of artists, activists and people on the Left moved to Hackney because housing was cheap, rent was affordable, and there was a big squatting culture. Hackney Council was Labour controlled, the welfare state was still in place supporting a radical counter-culture that had begun to take place in the late ’60s. There’s been gentrification in Hackney for twenty years now, but I think there’s still this idea that it’s a place to live for young creative people. Hackney is still slightly affordable with co-sharing and models of cooperative living, and there’s lots culturally going on in terms of theater, bars, clubs, book shops, cinemas and cultural community spaces like the Rio. In terms of its workforce, the Rio is predominantly made up of trans, queer and non-binary young people. It’s an inclusive queer space – which is amazing.

JW: I want to come back to how you co-created Club des Femmes. You were programming, you were curating. And making films?

SR: Yes, in setting out a queer feminist way of film programming we wanted to change the shape of programming and film culture. Thinking back, when we first started doing screenings, we would ask the projectionist to put on our Club de Femmes ident before the main presentation. This was a found footage clip that Sarah made from film archives in the ’60s and ’70s. We were also quite particular about what music was played. Some of our earlier programming crises were covered up by us making a short film. I remember in 2013, we wanted to celebrate Nico’s 75th birthday as our “Club des Femmes Icon.” That was the first time we made a film because at the last minute we couldn’t get the rights to show a documentary from 1988 by Bernd Gaul called Nico: In Memoriam. So we made a short film about Nico instead and we showed that. We have made quite a few films along the way, to fill in the gaps of cinema history, archival absence or our mistakes in programming.²² Concurrently, we have always created discrete pieces of design work, like our idents, also flyers, stickers, badges and bags, which have nurtured the sense of a Club des Femmes cinema community and friends des femmes (as we call it) friendship circle (Fig. 3).

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Club des Femmes’s programming collaboration with the London Short Film Festival 2008–2023.

Citation: Studies in World Cinema 5, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26659891-bja10054

courtesy of club des femmes archive.

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We have always been conscious about reaching audiences in different ways, not just in the cinema. People have said when they come to our screenings that it’s a very open, friendly space, and we’re conscious about helping people feel comfortable. We think a lot about creating a welcoming, non-academic, fun atmosphere, even though we are serious about the work that we do. At the beginning it probably felt a little chaotic if you came to one of our screenings because we didn’t really prepare too much – we would make things up as we went along and regrettably did not photograph or video any of the events. We started to apply for small bits of funding and then, in 2017, we got really ambitious, and, with funding from the bfi in collaboration with the Independent Cinema Office, we curated a four-month national film tour marking the 50th anniversary of May ’68 through a feminist and queer lens. Now I am more inclined to return to working in smaller spaces. I’m interested to continue to excavate the Rio’s archive. For me, thinking local is more meaningful. When I program a film or event, I see how each screening produces a different collective experience of being in the world for audiences, a different mode of “worlding” to cite Schoonover and Galt’s theory.

JW: What you’re doing then, at the same time as programming and making films, is also archiving your material? So there is a continuity here: you are actively conserving things and moving them forward.

SR: Definitely. I think that’s something I’ve become much more conscious of since doing my research, because I saw that often my participants had kept their own archives and they would show me the material. I’ve got the Club des Femmes archive in my flat. Reading Joan Nestle taught me the value of conserving our own histories because if we don’t do it, no-one else will. I want to leave a paper trail for future queer programmers, curating collectives and historians. I was rereading about Richard Dyer’s pioneering film season “Gays and Film” at the nft because I bought the pamphlet on eBay. Caroline Sheldon co-programmed that season – she was the first British woman to write a new theory of lesbian film criticism. Yet she’s been forgotten and left out of this important moment in lesbian and gay film studies.²³

JW: Is that where your particular profile as both a practitioner in terms of programming and theorist in terms of your academic work emerges – through the archiving of the material that you are bringing together and also creating with Club des Femmes? Is that where the theory and the practice come together?

SR: At Club des Femmes we see film programming as a critical practice, in that we make the cinema a queer and feminist space for discussion. We see queer and feminist curating work as scholarly work. Showing films, writing about films, discussing films with audiences: this is critical and cultural work that continues to linger on the margins of film studies. We know there is value in documenting and keeping alive collective experiences of screenings and community events because of the programming and cultural knowledge held in those encounters. In the 1980s, lesbian and gay film programming practices drew on the consciousness-raising work of women’s film festivals in the 1970s. In my PhD, I argue women’s counter-cinema screenings practices and audiences were the third missing element in the development of feminist film theory and filmmaking of the 1970s. It’s these histories, theories, practices and archives that I’m trying to reconnect. The theory and the practice always go together. I look at the history through practice because I lead as a practitioner, as an alternative way of thinking and doing in the archive.

JW: With the knowledge and experience you have also acquired through working in film exhibition in London and Berlin and your attendance at international film festivals over many years, how would you assess the London queer film scene? There’s what the bfi does, for example, a corporate idea of queer cinema (showcasing queer films, often with big stars, around set themes, etc.), which is very different from Fringe!. My underlying question is this: does it make sense to talk about a “global queer cinema,” in terms of the films themselves as well as the audiences and forms of distribution and reception? Hearing you it’s very clear we’re talking about specificities: specific moments and specific places and locations. I don’t get the impression you wish to amalgamate them but rather maintain their specificity. This would seem on one level to go against a certain idea of a queer global cinema – a form of world cinema one can evoke with confidence and in which, and by which, everything else can then be arranged and slotted together. I’m sensing your approach would be rather to start and stick with the communal rather than the universal. A certain degree of universalizing always has to be done, of course, to move the goalposts forward, but I do get the sense that you are more focused on approaching things in that kind of localized way. Would this be true?

SR: That’s true, but I hope that what we do is global too, since it foregrounds a politics of scale, from the local to the global. At the Tate Britain event last week we had a filmmaker called Lin Li from Hong Kong. Lin showed a one-minute film about Faslane Naval Base in Scotland, which is where nuclear weapons are stored in the UK. The film was called Witnessing Peace. It was about state surveillance and power in Britain today. In the discussion Lin brought in her own experiences of living in Hong Kong in the last 15–20 years. For me, this is a good example of how queer, decolonial, feminist cinema enables different ways of being in the world. I guess the Rio would be our spiritual home, a community cinema that serves local and global audiences because of its location in one of the most diverse boroughs in the UK.

JW: I have a further question I’d like to ask, though I don’t anticipate an answer necessarily. One of the things that defined lesbian/gay cinema in the 1980s and into the ’90s was its commitment to the anti-racist movement – part of a social movement that also included the miners’ strikes. Do you think it’s fair to say that that sort of intersectionality has been replaced by queer/trans? There’s obviously the vicious debates currently taking place in the media, but I’m not really thinking about that so much as the visibility of trans which is now informing what one might think of as queer cinema. Questions of race and ethnicity are always there, and have to be there, but the key question defining this particular moment in 2024 is perhaps that sense of trans and how queer cinema responds to it. You’ve already invoked queer/trans squats in Hackney during the ’70s, so I assume this is something you’re very familiar and comfortable with. But do you think that this is the watershed moment when queer cinema reconfigures itself and opens up?

SR: To come back to Jaye’s trans curatorial project “TGirlsonFilm”: at a time when trans lives, rights – and especially trans kids’ healthcare rights – are under attack, it is vital to share space and resources as much as possible. In the Global North, gay filmmaking as we might know it has gone mainstream. I am thinking most recently of Andrew Haigh’s ghost story All of Us Strangers, and Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s B movie Drive-Away Dolls, apparently originally called “Drive Away Dykes” until the studio said no. So the cinema that communities and audiences need to be attending to now is queer and trans cinema, shown at small film festivals, grassroots screenings and community events. Yet we should never forget the cinematic specificities of lgbtqi+ identities and gender and sexual fluidities. Today queer has become this kind of blanket branding term used by the market for everything. I draw strength from the messy, tumultuous and radical times of women’s liberation, lesbian liberation and the queer, lez and dyke culture of the ’80s and the ’90s, to keep remembering that lesbians have always been there – making sure that our histories are remembered (Fig. 4). Because as women they will be forgotten. But I also think that at this moment, because of the transphobic mainstream press, it’s important that trans film histories, archives, and communities are given support by the queer community.

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Club des Femmes x Rio: Lesbian Camp: “Yes, It’s F**cking Political.” 5–6 June 2021. Left to right: Sam McBean, Ania Ostrowska, Selina Robertson.

Citation: Studies in World Cinema 5, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/26659891-bja10054

courtesy of club des femmes archive.

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JW: So you do use the term “queer,” but with the sense always of where the term has come from and its history – in a sort of provisional way, to be defined, to be nuanced. Queer marks a gesture to connect and be inclusive – and that’s crucial for the present moment in terms of trans.

SR: Definitely.

JW: To consider for a moment the expanded term “queer world cinema,” the umbrella title of this special issue: it’s a way of bringing certain questions together, but perhaps it’s not really a question about definition as such.

SR: When I think about queer global cinema, I think of the local and how this impacts those things close to us, the things we care about and will speak out about in terms of our impact globally, and also how the work that we do remains rooted in the community that we are part of. I am conscious of that, so yes, putting those three words together feels ill-fitting. That would be something I would move away from, but there’s lots to think around it, because it is possible to think about the work that we do and share as a world-remaking project.

JW: We’ve talked about cinema but not about other forms such as web series. You still talk of making a film, and of film as a final product.

SR: Yes, I still very much believe in the theatrical, collective cinema experience although I’m not fetishistic about showing film on film (although it is very beautiful). During lockdown we did some online curatorial work with Pratibha Parmar. In the urgency of the blm movement, we showed Pratibha’s film A Place of Rage from 1991, and we commissioned some new writing on the film by Irenosen Okojie.²⁴ We also facilitated an online discussion between Pratibha and Lola Olufemi.²⁵ This project was very rewarding and collaborative, and we learned a lot about online curating, especially the technological aspects, but we just couldn’t wait to get back into the cinema.

JW: Do you see a distinction between that sort of experience, whether it’s part of a program you have curated or a one-off event, and the big festival experience?

SR: I think a distinction would be a politics of scale and economics, and the different contexts within which films are being shown, which embody diverse experiences. Queer audiences watch films on different screens, in different ways and for different reasons: to be entertained, to escape, to dream, to reimagine, to learn, to connect and create communities of support and solidarities. There are a multitude of ways audiences can consume the moving image. For me, more interesting, ambitious film programming work is mostly done at a more grassroots, micro level, connecting socially and politically with specific audiences.

JW: One festival that I think exemplifies what you are describing is the annual International Queer and Migrant Film Festival (iqmf) in Amsterdam, because it really is about the community.²⁶ There are social events around the films with both the filmmakers and the audience who are part of the local queer migrant and refugee community, as well as other people from outside. There is a core audience, and it’s very exciting, very political.

SR: That’s the thing: film culture and community stay connected. I think that with the bigger mainstream festivals it’s enacted, even performed, for the vagaries of turbo capitalism, as opposed to using it as a tool of cultural practice.