Interview: Georgette Turner
Can you tell us about working on WONDER WOMAN – you were location managing while pregnant with your second child, is that right? I was five months pregnant when I went on the film, and seven and a half months when [...]
Hope Dickson Leach and Alice Lowe Do Festivals
Hope Dickson Leach: ALICE. Alice Lowe: Yes Hope. HDL: We met in person for the first time in Toronto. You’d just come from Venice and for me it was my world premiere. I had left my children at home and you [...]
Interview: Robin Swicord
Robin Swicord is the award-winning and Oscar-nominated screenwriter of a significant body of films that often put the family lives of women front and centre, including Little Women, Matilda (with her husband, Nick Kazan), The Perez Family, Practical Magic, and Memoirs of a Geisha, as [...]
Case Study: Miranda Bowen Sets Off for The Last Post
A week today I am due to fly to Cape Town, South Africa to start prepping the second block of a BBC drama, The Last Post, a Peter Moffat scripted story set in Aden in the 60s about the end of [...]
Lorna Martin on writing and motherhood
The challenges of trying to combine motherhood with a creative career hit home for me a couple of years ago when my older daughter, then four, was doing a project in nursery about summer holidays. She informed me that all her [...]
I, Daniel Blake: Alison Carter-Goulden and Erline O’ Donovan Talk Job Sharing
Erline O' Donovan: This was the first time I’d job shared. I got put in contact with Alison through a friend I’d worked with on a previous project. I knew that I was about to work on another project that didn’t [...]
Interview: Mania Akbari
Mania Akbari is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker, artist, writer, and actress. Her provocative, revolutionary and radical films were recently the subject of retrospectives at the BFI, London (2013), the DFI, Denmark (2014), Oldenburg International Film Festival, Germany (2014) and Cyprus Film Festival [...]
Interview: Desperate Optimists
Desperate Optimists are Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor. Born in Dublin, Ireland, they studied theatre in the UK in the late 80s. From 1992 to 1999 they toured six internationally acclaimed devised theatre shows. Between 2000 and 2003 they directed a number of [...]
The Levelling Diaries: A Final Look
The Levelling receives its world premiere tonight at the Toronto International Film Festival. In our final diary instalment writer/director Hope Dickson Leach (HDL) talks to her husband Phil Miller (PJEM) about primary parenting, routine and freezers full of food. HDL: The [...]
The Prevenge Diaries: Alice Lowe on Finding Her Film and Finding Her Feet
Tonight, PREVENGE receives its world premiere at Venice Critics' Week. Below, in our third instalment of The Prevenge diaries, Alice Lowe talks us through the edit process with a tiny baby on her lap. I find that with films, as with [...]
The Prevenge Diaries: Alice Lowe on Pregnancy, Production & Panic Buckets
Here's our second instalment from Alice Lowe's diary on making her first feature film, Prevenge, whose world premiere will open Critics' Week at the 2016 Venice Film Festival. Read the first instalment, about the shoot, here. It’s upsetting and sad that people put off having [...]
Christina Pickworth on balancing motherhood and her business
I work for myself, like many people in film & TV, so maternity leave hasn’t really been an option for me in the traditional sense. With both my children I had a very notional three weeks off, which in reality involved [...]
Interview: Kelly O’Brien
Kelly O'Brien is an independent filmmaker and mother of three who lives in Toronto. Her film “Softening” won the grand jury prize in the shorts competition at the 2013 DOC NYC festival and appeared in the New York Times online. She recently exhibited [...]
Vicki Lesley on documentary making
Making a film is hard. Making a film and having a baby is a lot harder! Back in 2006, I was a busy freelancer working on popular factual shows for broadcasters like the BBC, Channel 4 and Discovery, travelling the world and [...]
Esther May Campbell: Heroes and Gods
Men and women are different. Whether because of our genes or conditioning. We experience, at home and on the street, playground or onscreen, different qualities prized in females and males. Big cinema stories internationally exported most obviously in the superhero franchises, [...]
Testimonial: Alex Helfrecht and Jörg Tittel
We are Co-Directors, Co-Writers and Co-Parents. Oh yeah, and we’ve been married for nearly a decade. Not that we have much time to think about such trivial things like love. We shot our first feature, THE WHITE KING, in Hungary last [...]
Moms-in-Film Founder Talks of Challenges and Lessons Learned
I have recently come to three realizations about being a filmmaker and a parent. The first is that everything comes down to money. The second is that the challenges facing parents in the industry disproportionately affect women. The third is that [...]
Shooting Away From Home: What We Learned
This week we had our first informal Raising Films gathering, to discuss Shooting Away From Home. A room of parents gathered to share their experiences, or to find answers to questions that were worrying them. Some people were shooting away from [...]
Making Films, Making Change at the Radical Film Network
"I'm excited, and a little unnerved, to be part of this original event, which brings my professional and parental responsibilities into the same space for the first time," said Making Films, Making Change panellist Jennifer Armitage, Screen Officer at Creative Scotland. It was the first time [...]
The Levelling Diaries: Post
I get home back to Edinburgh on Halloween. My children are out guising, and the house is empty and dark. I drag in my muddy welly boots and collapse. The doorbell rings and there are a group of children offering me [...]