agnès films is an online community of women filmmakers, scholars, and film lovers. Although our focus is to support and bring light to the work of women filmmakers, we welcome male members interested in women’s moving-image work.

We are proud to announce our new venture in supporting women filmmakers. We will be featuring reviews of films, videos, and television shows. We will review moving images that are long, short, and of any genre. The unifying characteristic is that the work will be made by women. Occasionally, we will review work made by men that features particularly strong female characters. Although we will mostly review newer work, we will also review older films, videos, and television shows in our aim to develop a resource that provides critical responses to the moving images women have been making for many decades. We will also review film festivals with a focus on assessing how festivals feature and portray the work of women filmmakers.

As agnès films member, Martha Lauzen, explains in a Hollywood Reporter article, 70% of film critics are men, who, not surprisingly, tend to write about male-driven films. As a result, stories by and about women receive less attention. As a way to reverse that cycle and to bring critical light to moving images made by women, we have assembled a group of seven filmmakers, scholars, and critics to review for agnès films:

• Bahareh Alaei, an experimental video composer and graduate student at California State University, Long Beach, where she studies digital rhetoric and composition.
• Tammy Fortin, the Curatorial Program Manager at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, where she curates and produces public programs that range from film screenings to concerts and everything in between.
• Casey Miles, a documentary filmmaker and PhD student in Rhetoric & Writing at Michigan State University.
• Ruth Novaczek, an experimental/avant-garde filmmaker who teaches video production at the University of Westminster and film appreciation, world cinema, and film noir at Regents American College London.
• Sue Salinger, a social documentarian and alternative news and information producer, who develops and creates participatory media content and collaborative media capabilities in groups working for change.
• Jennifer June Strawn a screenwriter, filmmaker, and photographer, whose feature drama, A Sea Like Glass, was a quarter-finalist for the 2010 Nicholls Fellowship.
• Moira Sullivan, a scholar, lecturer, film critic, promoter, and experimental filmmaker who is a member of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) and served on the 2012 Queer Palm Jury at Cannes.

If you want to know more about these fantastic women, please visit our About page.

As an example of the kinds of reviews you can expect to read on agnès films, here are three inaugural reviews. Please click on the links below to read them:

• Margarethe Von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt reviewed by Ruth Novaczek
• Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Vie d’Adèle (Blue is the Warmest Color) reviewed by Moira Jean Sullivan
• Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell reviewed by Alexandra Hidalgo

We hope you enjoy them and that you’ll share them with others.

If you are a filmmaker and would like us to review your work, please contact us at contributions@agnesfilms.com. If there is a moving-image work made by women that you would like us to review, email us at the same address.

To meet other members of our community and be part of our discussions, join our Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/152307141458448/). You can also become a member of the site (it’s free).

We look forward to sharing our thoughts on moving images made by women with you!

The agnès films editors:

Alexandra Hidalgo, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, Michigan State University

Denah Johnston, Ph.D. Instructor of film, Academy of Art University, San Francisco

Visit the website at http://agnesfilms.com/news/announcing-agnes-filmss-new-review-feature/