Search

In this study, I examine the presence of Kenyan women in the film industry through the lens of postcolonial African feminism. Situating the study in this theoretical framework heightened the awareness that ideologies of womanhood and struggles against gender oppression intersect and cannot be analysed without considering the contextualisation of womanhood. Postcolonial African feminist theory reflects that issues that affect women in each place and time are different (former colonies and western regions). This study explores and uses the afro feminist lens to analyse the responses by Kenyan women filmmakers to comment on filmmaking in Kenya. The film industry offers an important arena where manifestations of African feminism can be explored, as espoused by the women filmmakers in this study: Matrid Nyagah, Jinna Mutune, Ng'endo Mukii, Wanuri Kahiu, Judy Kibinge, Dommie Yambo-Odotte, and Anne Mungai. By adopting a qualitative research design using face-to-face semi-structured interviews, I examined the filmmakers' career paths, motivations, perceptions, challenges, and barriers to getting into and remaining in a male-dominated industry. The thesis reveals that the level of Kenyan women's representation in the film industry on the global scene was proof that the women were empowered, competent, talented, and able to tell their stories through their lived experiences. The study also identifies barriers and challenges that impede their reach to a wider audience. Key among them were the lack of proper film schools in Kenya that teach the requisite content, the ongoing patriarchal system, the lack of defined film culture, a lack of a government policy on film, lack of government support, lack of funding, and poor marketing and distribution channels, among others that seem to truncate the full potential of women in the film industry. I argue that Kenyan women filmmakers have excelled, given an excellent account of the stories they tell from their lived experiences. These filmmakers' films not only deal with women's issues, Africa, war, famine, disease, and the girl child alone but also seem to focus on neo-feminism (as defined by Obioma Nnaemeka) and tackle subjects on sexuality, female emancipation, mother-daughter relationships, HIV/AIDS, drugs, science and technology, postelection violence and terrorism. Neo-feminism offers space for women filmmakers to work alongside men since it advocates for negotiating with them to achieve hard ideals. The study found that though women in the Kenyan film industry did not agree they were working within a feminist framework, they objected to the western attitude toward feminism. It is also found that whereas some of the women filmmakers trained locally, the training they received abroad contributed to their being better filmmakers. Indeed, the Kenyan film industry has offered mixed signals as regards supporting its women filmmakers. While the government has faltered, the women filmmaker's grit and sense of purpose have helped them stamp their presence in the film industry both locally and internationally. Also, the study revealed that despite the important role women filmmakers play in the film industry, there was a lack of support from the government. However, family members continued to provide both financial and emotional support to the women filmmakers to live up to their dream. In addition, the lack of a national film policy to regulate the film industry meant that gender was not mainstreamed in it. Women filmmakers continue to negotiate for space through their passion, supporting and mentoring each other, recognising other women's efforts in the industry through film awards and establishing funding opportunities specifically for women but also for men.

Following the coup that took place on September 11th, 1973, and until the beginning of the 21st century, the cinematic memory of the Chilean dictatorship rested in the hands of people who had directly experienced the Coup and the seventeen years of authoritarianism and who, for the most part, had fled into exile. Until the end of the dictatorship in 1990, theirs was a cinema of memory and resistance, focused on the victims and often silencing the executioners. However, the new century brought new filmmakers, people who grew up during the dictatorship and whose experience of it led them to film different stories from different points of view. The filmmakers in this thesis were all born after 1973, and all began producing after 1990: they are, in the end, children of the dictatorship and filmmakers of the democracy - a transitional generation of sorts. They produce a critical representation of both dictatorship and democracy, to the point where the limit between the two periods is no longer clear: this reveals a questioning of the concept of "democratic transition" in the Chilean context, as well as an attempt to represent the symptoms of trauma. Understood in this thesis as examples of post-traumatic filmmaking, the films of our corpus reflect upon the continuities of dictatorship in democracy. They also offer a meta-reflection on cinema's representation of atrocity and the traumatic past. This dissertation will explore a political and ethical reading of this generation's work. The adoption in the films of an aesthetics of trauma is the basis of an ethical discourse on both one's accountability in the present for the horrors of the past and on the social role of cinema and its (non)representation of trauma. Through this, the films invite the viewer to engage in critical spectatorship. The aesthetics of trauma thus leave abundant space for the viewer to participate in the film, and this active participation allows for self-reflection on the viewer's part. Offering an alternative reading to the apolitical interpretations of these filmmakers that have abounded, this thesis aims to present this generation's work as a different approach to political filmmaking.

This PhD by Publication focuses on the representation of motherhood on 'quality' American television and how that is intrinsically linked to women's political and economic oppression in society. Although this study focuses on contemporary television series, it is grounded in a history of how motherhood has been theorized, its cultural positioning and how this informs the representations of maternity, motherhood and mothering in quality American television drama. Arguing that, in order to understand how patriarchy subjugates women, we need to expose the way patriarchal norms related to motherhood work as, while 'we know that difference exists, ... we don't understand it as constituted relationally',1 I propose that cultural attitudes expressed through televisual representations betray a deep-rooted misogyny that ties women to their reproductive potential thus impacting their positioning in society, their employment prospects and a lifetime's wage prospects. With so many meshes of ideological carriers at work, I conclude that it is urgent to bring them into consciousness and wield that knowledge politically.2 My work brings what is invisible into discourse, what is unconscious into consciousness and teaches us much about the ingrained attitudes of a neoliberal western patriarchal society, how it views motherhood and the impact that has on women in society more broadly. My original contribution to this field acknowledges 'quality' television's soap opera roots, and, by analysing series from a feminist perspective, shows that much can be revealed about the patriarchal unconscious, how it views its mothers and how women are inevitably linked to their reproductive potential.

This practice-based PhD explores the writing process for an original screenplay titled Lucy Drives a Car, a 65 page script written within the style and sensibilities of art cinema combined with dramedy, a genre that blends both drama and comedy. The thesis carries out a detailed analysis of selected screenplay fragments from the film Ratcatcher (1999), and the television series Atlanta (2016-18). Both of these objects of study illustrate how the narrative modes of art cinema and dramedy function at a creative, formal and practical level. This allowed me to determine how I could incorporate these film narrative modes into my screenplay. The introduction of the essay examines the predominant features of art cinema and dramedy, and presents an overview of Ratcatcher and Atlanta that outlines how these narrative trends are used. The key research question, separated into four key aims, is introduced and the methodology implemented to achieve each of them is explained.  Chapter One investigates Ratcatcher's narrative structure, and carries out a deeper analysis of its 'James and Margaret Anne' storyline. It distinguishes the plot's narrative elements and how they are used to imbue emotional significance to unimportant events. Specific sections from the screenplay are studied to resolve how they convey the film's melancholic mood, and how the script communicates the character's feelings with minimal use of dialogue. Other strategies, such as the handling of open and unresolved narratives, the implementation of ellipsis, the use of close ups, and how it conveys an ambiguous sense of time are also analysed.  Atlanta is examined in Chapter Two with the analysis of the series' comedy and drama elements. It discusses how the show comments upon social themes within relatable, everyday situations, and how it handles surrealist elements in hyper realistic settings. A scene by scene analysis of the Streets On Lock episode examines the series' blend of societal observations with comedic moments, and how this combination may be both copious and nuanced. Chapter Three looks into the writing process of the Lucy Drives a Car screenplay which deals with the emotional repercussions of a family trying to continue with their daily lives after the disappearance of a loved one. It examines the development of the early story ideas from a plot-driven narrative to an art cinema style, and the use of a free writing approach that highlights character development. It also discusses narrative qualities, including the use of commonplace situations, surrealist elements and how the screenplay attempts to present social commentaries without infringing on the audience. The fundamental ideas framed in this research are the detailed analysis of selected screenplay texts. This analysis, performed at a granular level, aids the comprehension of the narrative strategies found within specific scenes, yet it is an uncommon method in screenplay studies. The thesis also delves into seemingly uneventful story situations to develop deeper meaning within the mundane. Furthermore, it explores how humour can expound on a film's themes and accentuate a story's dramatic elements. The findings within this thesis may be useful for screenwriters that develop scripts in the art cinema or dramedy style.

Politics and aesthetics in the cinema of Luchino Visconti 1943-1963 This thesis provides an innovative approach to the cinematic work of Luchino Visconti, from Ossessione in 1943 to Il gattopardo 1963. Visconti is known as a canonical figure in Italian cinema but it has been difficult to see the relevance of his work to current concerns in the field of film studies. The conventional view has been that Visconti's work should be understood through the frame of either neorealism or auteur cinema. Most scholars have focused on his themes of major political significance, or have argued that his visual language is best understood as an expression of high-culture references. But this thesis argues that these films from the earlier period in Visconti's career can be successfully used as a site for discussing contemporary issues: questions on the relationship between cinema, politics and national identity, on taste and gender, on the popular aspects of cinema, and on methods that focus more on cinema as an industry. A consistent focus of this research project is to scrutinise and disentangle the complex relationship between Visconti's attention to the aesthetics and politics of his films. The first two chapters of this thesis explore the details of the political and critical context in which Visconti worked and in which his work was received. In chapters three, four and five, I apply contemporary theories - theories of modernity and consumer culture, of decorative aesthetics and of actor performances - to challenge some of the most historically entrenched views on Visconti. Using archive material, interviews, and biographies, the first chapter explores how Visconti's relationship with the Italian Communist Party was based on a network of personal connections with Communist collaborators and senior party officials and shows how Visconti's films played an active role in the development of the cultural policies of the PCI. In chapter two I examine the debates that the films provoked, placing them within the Italian culture and society of the time, focusing primarily on their reception by the PCI and Marxist film critics. In chapter three I tackle the anti-decorative bias that has tended to categorise Visconti's aesthetics as regressive, and offer a new reading of Visconti's use of decoration and mise-en-scene. In chapter four I examine several examples in which Visconti's films engage with consumer culture and modernity, and show how these introduce complexities into the political messages of the films. In chapter five, I bring together a range of sources to draw conclusions about how Visconti chose and worked with actors - an area that has been almost entirely left out of the literature on Visconti.

This thesis considers the role of the male body in the construction of a Northern English place-myth in fictional film and television. As scholarship of the region's representation acknowledges, masculinity is dominant within the production of a Northern imaginary. However, critical discussion of this masculine coding frequently overlooks the male body itself. Consequently, this body has been produced as a taken-for-granted formation; an obvious figure carrying a limited set of meanings. In contrast, this thesis argues that representations of male embodiment are complex sites of meaning which must be read, textually, to be understood, culturally and historically. In its methodology, the thesis combines textual analysis with an examination of aesthetic, social and political contexts. By treating text and context as reciprocal, I chart how fictional representations of the male body both respond to and actively produce our sense of the North's meanings and values at specific points in time. The first part of the thesis establishes an intellectual and cultural history, by asking what precedent exists for describing representations of male embodiment as specifically Northern. In Chapter One's literature review, I demonstrate how the Northern male body has pervaded scholarship on the region as a concept with an implicit but influential presence. Chapter Two examines the relationship between male bodies and the production of historical narratives of the North according to a canon of film and television texts. This is a critically complex task which requires, firstly, reproducing a canonical screen history in order to map how male bodies have mediated changing notions of Northern identity, and, secondly, critically querying the representational politics of a 'Northern' canon. The second part of the thesis involves an investigation of contemporary representations of the male body. The primary field of investigation is the representation of male embodiment in texts produced between 2008 and 2020. This period has seen the re-emergence of the North as culturally significant in the mediation of a post-recession structure of feeling, in part through the popularity and controversy of releases such as I, Daniel Blake (2016), Happy Valley (2014 -), and God's Own Country (2017). Across three chapters, I examine three modalities of male bodily representation in this period, which I term, respectively: the deteriorated body, the youthful body, and the racialised body. By treating deterioration, youthfulness, and racialisation to be specific, if overlapping, processes in the representation of Northern masculinity, these chapters emphasise the rhetorical nature of these bodies and locate social and ideological meaning in the contradictions that result from this rhetorical specificity.

Women's cinema has been the focus of much of the scholarly discussion that has developed feminist film criticism. However, theorists have not treated the concept of 'feminist film' in much detail, and previous studies of feminist cinema have not dealt with the possibility of male filmmakers doing feminist filmmaking. This thesis argues that the gender identity of directors who can make feminist films is not fixed and addresses the neglected aspect of male directors presenting feminist perspectives through cinema. Along with the focus on cinematic representations of gender, this thesis also analyses the roles played by sociocultural context, history, ethnicity and sexual orientation in capturing feminist representations on film. Adopting an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach, combining feminist film theory with cultural studies, gender studies and film theory and philosophy, this study conducts a close reading of All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999), Centre Stage (Stanley Kwan, 1991), Summer Snow (Ann Hui, 1995) and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) - Westernised and Hong Kong films made by directors with different genders (male and female) between 1990-2000. By situating these films and directors in a transregional, transcultural or intertextual context, this thesis indicates that feminist film in contemporary times is not only about the on-screen representations of female identities or experiences, women's oppression and strength but also revelations about how hegemonies regarding gender, race, class and culture impact on the social identities and lives of individuals. The films discussed here show that film feminism or feminist filmmaking is not merely a one-dimensional discussion of gender but a dynamic process - in theoretical and practical manners - that intersects with different sociocultural issues in a diverse environment.

A Diamond Geeza is a Girl's Best Friend is a collection of short stories and vignettes that demonstrates predominantly working-class men, trapped within a toxic, patriarchal sphere and explores themes such as power, reclamation of honour and the changing cultural landscape of Great Britain. The main story from the creative folder, 'Author of His Own Doom' chronicles, through the first-person narrative, how the protagonist attempts to rise above his surroundings and baser instincts and works towards discovering his identity and self-respect. The accompanying critical study contributes to the knowledge of metafictional writing. The creative process contributes by acknowledging the existence of a limiting and often degrading space for working class men and the ways in which they may seek a redress. This study refutes the assumption that metafiction is elitist or passé and is instead a powerful social tool to understand both cultural perimeters and the self, demonstrating the value of building a narrative for men who may feel that they have little or no voice. The sources that support this research include creative and critical texts, as follows: Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, Martin Amis's Money, and Davis Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men; David Lodge's The Art of Metafiction, Robert Scholes' Fabulation and Metafiction, Patricia Waugh's Metafiction The Theory and Practice of Self- Conscious Fiction, William H. Gass's Fiction and the Figures of Life, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Dan Ariely 's Predictably Irrational, Mary K. Holland's A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies and Jonathon Greenberg's Was Anyone Hurt: The End of Satire in A Handful of Dust.

Film sequels have usually been looked down upon by fans and film critics alike, as well as overlooked by most film theorists. However, sequels provide a rich layering of intertextuality that create all kinds of new meanings worth looking into more closely. This dissertation investigates the type of sequels in which the passing of time, both inside and outside of the story, becomes a key feature of the films themselves. I focus on sequels that acknowledge, incorporate, and specifically reflect on the duration between one film and the other often with ten, twenty or even over thirty years passing between instalments. My research focuses on their use of temporality, developing the vocabulary to speak about them and how they convey the passage of time. I primarily analyse the character development and the longterm gaps, which, even if inconspicuous and until now ignored, play an essential part in the intertextuality of the films. When we look at these sequels in depth, we discover they provide a new way to look at narrative time closely related to real-life time. This intersection of the two allows for a new way to think about time and its effects in the long term, both regarding character development and the social contexts around them. This study provides a new perspective to look at sequels and the temporal intertextuality between them. My purpose is to define this type of sequel as a 'time-critical sequel' and show how they operate by enhancing an old story while telling a new one.

In this thesis I bring the nonhuman animal character into the discourse of Film Studies, from which they have by and large been excluded. Including the nonhuman animal character helps to expand film theoretical discussions that have normally been restricted to human characters. In order to address this omission, I introduce and conceptualise two notions: the nonhuman animal call and the cinematic call on behalf of the nonhuman animal. The nonhuman animal call is an umbrella term for a variety of nonhuman animal expressions. Some of such expressions are based on five basic senses on which humans rely, but the nonhuman animal call also includes senses not present in humans. The division of calls is non-hierarchical. The aim of introducing the nonhuman animal call is to emphasise nonhuman animal performance and expression as intentional, meaningful, and important for the film in which the nonhuman animal appears, and thereby opening up new interpretative possibilities which take the nonhuman animal perspective into consideration. The cinematic call on behalf of the nonhuman animal denotes film techniques, which, under certain conditions, can provide space for nonhuman animal calls to manifest themselves in the film, or help clarify nonhuman animal calls which the spectator might find unintelligible, or strengthen the nonhuman animal call's affective impact on the spectator. Cinematic calls on behalf of the nonhuman animal character are versatile, that is, they are not limited to a particular genre or tradition of filmmaking. Therefore, the reflection on the conditions which such film techniques must fulfil to be considered as cinematic calls invites a productive dialogue across genres and aesthetic traditions. As a result of such a reflection, this thesis offers some guidelines for film production and film analysis that are, on the one hand, more mindful of the nonhuman animal characters, and on the other hand, take into account diverse types of spectators, and the ways in which to appeal to them to invite a reflection on the nonhuman animal condition. The nonhuman animal call and the cinematic call on behalf of the nonhuman animal character are, therefore, practical, didactic, and analytic tools that can be applied in order to render the Film Studies discourse as well as film production and reception more animal-oriented.

'Cinema' still stands as Romania's longest-lasting film periodical. Between 1963 and 1989, it was the only Romanian film magazine published during the communist regime. After the fall of Communism in 1989, the magazine changed its title to Noul Cinema and continued to be published until 1998. Because of its singularity during Communism, Cinema has had a central role in the development of Romanian film criticism and culture. The periodical holds an important position in Romanian film history, yet there is no detailed academic research on the magazine. The present thesis addresses this gap in research by approaching Cinema as autonomous material of study, and analyses how Hollywood film was presented to readers and audiences in the context of Romania's totalitarian communist regime, and then in the post-communist context. The PhD. project focuses on coverage of the Hollywood film scene as that which was most affected by the political backdrop. During Communism, Cinema was State-owned, censored and obliged to fulfil the ideological requirements of the Romanian Communist Party and its leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu. These demands specifically shaped the coverage of Hollywood films and stars, depending on Romania's political relationship with the West. The national cinema dominated the pages of the magazine, while Hollywood film was dismissed as entertainment, and used to illustrate the superficiality of America's capitalist society. However, at times Cinema magazine was also a window to the outside world, sneaking in coverage of Hollywood films and stars when the oppression of the communist regime was at its peak. During the violent context of Romania's 1989 revolution, Cinema became Noul Cinema. Censorship and political pressures were lifted, and coverage of Hollywood cinema came to dominate its pages. Cinema magazine survived Romania's communist dictatorship, and as Noul Cinema witnessed the 1989 revolution, the most important event in contemporary Romanian history. The analysis of the magazine provided by this thesis adds primary evidence to existing scholarship on Romanian national cinema, further revealing the reception of the globally popular Hollywood film in a once isolated country that continues to struggle with the trauma of its communist past.

This thesis explores the development of the film industry in Saudi Arabia from 2005 to 2020. It divides the industry's development in Saudi Arabia into two periods: from 2005 to 2015 and from 2015 to 2020. In the first period, the industry was supported and led by two key industry figures, the Rotana Group and the Saudi Film Festival (SFF). The second period was characterised by the government and non-profit organisations leading the industry's development through the Saudi Film Council (SFC), General Commission for Audiovisual Media (GCAM) and King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra). This thesis includes personal interviews with industry decision-makers and leaders such as the CEO of SFC, founder and CEO of the SFF and the Head of the Cinema Department at Ithra Centre. This thesis contributes to the knowledge of the Saudi Arabian film industry through a comprehensive analysis of the industry structures that can support the industry's growth, enabling government agencies, non-profit organisations and cultural institutions to better support its further development. The findings reveal that religious opposition to cinema led to its decline after 1979, and in the first time period, this opposition limited Rotana's ability to produce more films and closed its theatres. Events in the second time period demonstrate the government's seriousness about supporting the industry and its growth, and the government has established a massive financing policy for local and foreign films produced inside Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, the challenges of censorship still trouble film producers, especially for domestic films, whereas foreign films have greater freedom although the executive regulations for censorship do not differentiate between foreign and domestic films. Overall, this thesis aims to answer the question: What is meaningful about the Saudi film industry's development in the twenty-first century?

The Artist and the Regime explores the works of Czech filmmaker Karel Kachyňa during four decades of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Despite being a prolific filmmaker who made over forty feature films across five decades, Kachyňa's works outside the 1960s and the Czechoslovak New Wave have gone largely unnoticed in scholarship. This work challenges the uncertainty surrounding the reception of Kachyňa's works in the context of a totalitarian regime and a nationalised film industry and offers the thesis that Kachyňa's works provide a unique perspective on the communist era in Czechoslovakia. As such, this thesis engages with Kachyňa's film poetics from the historical and analytical perspectives, as well as providing an examination of spectatorial theorising which comprises another aspect of film poetics and therefore contributes to knowledge in this field. This work presents Kachyňa's unusual treatment of socialist realism from the outset of the communist era in Czechoslovakia in 1948, his approach to Army Film, his invocation of issues surrounding the concept of borders, his depiction of child narratives, his dealing with taboo subjects, his influence on and contribution to the New Wave movement, and his engagement with Holocaust narratives as evidence of an artist whose humanist poetics were at odds with his environment, despite working as an agent for the regime within a nationalised film industry. This paradoxical position offers an appreciation for individuals who experienced the trappings of the regime in Czechoslovakia during four decades of communist rule. By analysing a wide range of films in how they reflect and diverge from one another, this thesis ultimately argues that Kachyňa's humanist poetics challenge a system that attempted to reduce the individual's ability to express themselves freely. This thesis demonstrates how Kachyňa showed that it was possible to provide this challenge from within the staterun film industry without having works banned by the authorities. By examining his works throughout the communist regime in detail, a study of Kachyňa's poetics reveals a filmmaker whose works continued to provide criticism of the regime and the filmmaking culture in an implicit manner and challenges the critical response to his works that currently exists. From this position, the thesis presented here argues that Kachyňa is an important filmmaker of the twentieth century whose works require greater attention in scholarship.

This project follows the ghost of Gothic British masculinity across the ocean in the period of classical cinema. It examines the ways in which British stars were offered as an alternative to the American ideal of muscular, anti-intellectual, tough male identity. British men on film allowed Hollywood a glimpse in a mirror, a dark, haunted mirror, where identity might be fractured, damaged, liberated, queered or feminised. In a period dominated by two world wars and a Great Depression, identities of all types were being challenged and filmmakers used Britishness to allow this tension to seep into cinema. This project uses the lens of the Gothic as a method of uncovering the hidden history that is embedded in many films. The uncanny and the sublime, shadows and mirrors, portraits, decadent iconography and dark doubles all dominate in these cinematic texts. At a time when the Production Code made it necessary for subversive content to be well hidden, films contained embedded secret codes and invited possible alternative readings. Bringing together film scholarship with literary theorists this thesis offers fresh perspectives on historical cinematic meanings. This study presents a detailed analysis of British male stardom as it emerged in the period of early talkies. It details the ways in which the male stars, Ronald Colman, Basil Rathbone and George Sanders were presented in fan publications. It presents the contradictions inherent in their fan discourse and allows for consideration of the queerness that American culture seemed to accept was part of British - and European - male identity.

As the first and longest-running queer film festival in East Asia, the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (HKLGFF) was established in 1989. Since 2000, the HKLGFF has gradually commercialised, transforming into a self-sustained, market-driven queer film festival. Examining the operation of the HKLGFF offers insights into the queer film festivals that have undergone commercialisation around the world. Meanwhile, the examination of HKLGFF can reveal how small-scale queer film festivals interact with other (queer) film festivals regionally and globally. Focusing on the festival's operations from 2016 to 2020, I argue that under the neoliberal trend in the global queer film festival circuit, by privileging middle-class gay identity and commercial interests, the HKLGFF reproduces homonormativity, which characterises the consumption-oriented queer culture in Hong Kong. The thesis adopts a combined methodology, including semi-structured interviews, content analysis and secondary data analysis. The thesis contextualises the HKLGFF in terms of the historical development of the festival itself, in terms of the relationship with the global queer film festival circuit, and in terms of the territory of Hong Kong. This thesis also investigates how the festival operation reproduces homonormativity through its programming and its targeting of and affordances for audiences. Overall, this thesis expands the concept of homonormativity and interrogates it to all aspects of festival organisation and provides a framework to explore the specificity of a queer film festival through an analysis of the dual relationship between the festival and its local context as well as the global queer film festival circuit. This thesis also extends the discussion of the film festival circuit by mapping the broader picture of the global landscape of queer film festivals as well as investigating how the global queer film festival circuit influences the operation of small-scale queer film festivals in the Global South.

This practice-based research project comprises two related components: A web documentary to be found at https://kboswall.wixsite.com/speakmysister, and this written thesis. The web documentary is a multi-modal response to the revolutionary Mozambican film Sing My Brother - Help Me to Sing (José Cardoso, 1981). It is a curated collection of twenty short films made collaboratively with young Mozambican students of film and cultural studies in response to the 2018 National Festival of Culture theme: 'Culture, promoting women, identity and sustainable development'. The multi-modal, musical, interactive and non-linear format of the web documentary is a creative and critical response to the calls for intersectional decolonisation and inclusion in Mozambican film production, audio-visual research and knowledge construction. During the production, post-production, and multi-modal exhibition of the films both physical and on-line, this practice-led research engaged with questions of polyphony, dialogue, inclusivity and diversity in film production. The written component of this multi-modal thesis also embraces decolonial principles of multi-modality and non-linearity in its exploration of the research themes of the role of women's song, dance and film in knowledge construction in Mozambique. The seven chapters combine critical reflective analysis of the Speak My Sister research project and the resulting web documentary from historical, local, global and personal perspectives. Seven musical portraits from Cardoso's revolutionary film Sing My Brother - Help Me to Sing serve as conceptual and thematic springboards through which to explore three core themes: collaboration and authorship in audio-visual production, the role of music and dance in knowledge construction and exchange and the place of African feminism, decolonisation and cultural activism in Mozambique's audiovisual research and production in the future. The portraits are reimagined as written scripts, illustrated with screenshots taken from the original film to form cinematic pauses, or 'interludes', between each of the chapters. The text below is divided into three parts that follow the Aristotelian progression of narrative and logical argument: introduction, development and conclusion. The first three chapters that make up Part 1 introduce the theoretical principles and personal and historical context behind the research (Diawara 1992, Convents, 2011, Gray 2020). Part 2 is made up of three chapters each of which uses the practice as a starting point to explore theories around collaboration and authorship in Chapter 4 (Rangan 2017, Bishop 2012, MacDougall 1998, 2006, 2020, Rose 2017), local musicking and nego-feminism in Chapter 5 (Reiley and Brucker 2020, Nnaemeka, 2004) and body knowledge, gender and power in Chapter 6 (Cowan 1990, Conquergood 2002, Jackson 2012, Meintjes 2017, Impey 2020). In Part 3, the concluding seventh chapter takes these ideas to assess the contribution of this research towards constructing more inclusive representation in Mozambique in the future and the role of polyphonic and dialogic thinking in collaborative and authored audio-visual content (Aston and Odorico 2018). At a time where national and international governments are being asked to redress historic and institutional racial, geographical and gender inequalities, this critical creative practice combines lessons from visual anthropology, ethnomusicology, African film studies and media practice to approach the theme of decolonisation from a creative, personal, national, and international perspective, and so to explore the relationship between personal, local and global change.