By the UEA’s Stephanie Clayton, Keith M Johnston and Melanie Williams

This report by UEA – ‘Making Women Filmmakers Visible across the UK’s Film Archives is now available. It has been commissioned by Film Archives UK to explore the current scale and scope of the holdings of women’s amateur filmmaking within the regional and national film and media archives and to investigate ways of optimising their visibility.

The report follows on from an initial project in 2015, ‘Women’s Amateur Film’ when the UEA worked in association with FAUK member, the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA) highlighting the role of women’s international filmmaking.

The success of that initial project led to Film Archives UK commissioning the WAF team to undertake the nationwide archive mapping exercise of women’s amateur filmmaking that informs this report.

Surveying content from FAUK member archives – East Anglian Film Archive, Screen Archive South East, North West Film Archive, Lincolnshire Film Archive, The National Screen & Sound Archive of Wales, The National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive representing holdings right across the UK , the report champions the important work already done by film and media archives and historians and provides data for Film Archives UK, and the individual archives, to help raise the profile of some of the women filmmakers and to make them and their rich, fascinating work visible again.

The full report is available here  Invisible Innovators