OUR CATALOG

Kim Longinotto

Kim Longinotto (born 1952) is a British documentary filmmaker, well known for making films that highlight the plight of female victims of oppression or discrimination. Longinotto studied camera and directing at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, England, where she now tutors occasionally.

Longinotto was born to an Italian father and a Welsh mother; her father was a photographer who later went bankrupt. At the age of 10 she was sent to a draconian all-girls boarding school, where she found it hard to make friends due to the mistress forbidding anyone to talk to her for a term after she became lost during a school trip. After a period of homelessness, Longinotto went on to Essex University to study English and European literature and later followed friend and future filmmaker, Nick Broomfield to the National Film and Television School. While studying, she made a documentary about her boarding school that was shown at the London Film Festival, since when she has continued to be a prolific documentary filmmaker.

Longinotto is an observational filmmaker. Observational cinema, also known as direct cinema, free cinema or cinema verite, usually excludes certain documentary techniques such as advanced planning, scripting, staging, narration, lighting, reenactment and interviewing. Longinotto’s unobtrusiveness, which is an important part of observational documentary, gives the women on camera a certain voice and presence that may not have emerged with another documentary genre. She has received a number of awards for her films over the years, including a BAFTA for her documentary PINK SARIS.

Among her more than 20 films, she has followed a teenager struggling to become a wrestling star in 2000’s GAEA GIRLS, challenged the tradition of female genital mutilation in Kenya in 2002’s THE DAY I WILL NEVER FORGET, and told the story of an Indian Muslim woman who smuggled poetry out to the world while locked up by her family in 2013’s SALMA. In 2015's DREAMCATCHER Longinotto looks at the life and work of a former sex worker who rescues Chicago girls from the street.

Her new film SHOOTING THE MAFIA, premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. (3/19)

Florence Ayisi

Florence Ayisi was born in Kumba in Cameroon and works as an academic and a filmmaker. She obtained a degree in English from the University of Yaoundé and moved to the UK where she obtained an MA in Producing and Directing, an MA in Theatre and Media Production and a diploma in Television Production and Journalism. Her film SISTERS IN LAW won more than 27 awards, including the Prix Art et Essai at the Cannes Film Festival and a Peabody Award, and was short-listed for an Academy Award nomination in 2006. Her films portray the affirmative aspects of African life, presenting unique and rare insights into lived experiences and the rich and dynamic cultures. Her work also celebrates the growing emancipation of African women; showing how women’s work and visions are at the vanguard of social and economic development. She won the UK Film Council Breakthrough Brits Award for Film Talent in 2008 and since 2000, she has taught film at the University of South Wales. Her teaching and research is underpinned by issues and ideas relating to documentary theory, post-colonial theory, representation, feminism, spectatorship in African Cinema, transnational cinemas, African Diaspora narratives, ethnography as a research method, and in mapping the aesthetic of documentary content. Florence’s research is primarily practice-based. In 2005, Ayisi founded the production company Iris Films and in 2007 she was recognized with a meeting with the Queen for her work's link with Commonwealth countries. (01/20)