Nerdy women - the "hidden half" of fan culture - open up about their lives in the world of conventions, video games, and other rife-with-misogyny pop culture touchstones.

Canada | 2017 | 83 minutes | Color | DVD | Order No. 171210

SYNOPSIS

Nerdy women - the "hidden half" of fan culture - open up about their lives in the world of conventions, video games, and other rife-with-misogyny pop culture touchstones. While geek communities have recently risen to prominence, very little attention is paid to geek women. Filmmaker Gina Hara, struggling with her own geek identity, explores the issue with a cast of women who live geek life up to the hilt: A feminist geek blogger, a convention-trotting cosplayer, a professional gamer, a video-game designer, and a NASA engineer. Through their personal experiences in the rich cultural explosion of nerdom, GEEK GIRLS shows both the exhilaration of newfound community and the ennui of being ostracized. These women, striving in their respective professions and passions, face the cyberbullying, harassment, and sexism that permeate the culture and the industry at large. A rich conversation-starter for any class on Pop Culture and Feminism.

PRESS

"A celebration of girl gamers, girlhood, and geekdom."

"A film that celebrates diversity in geekdom while also maintaining a unified sense of wonder and sparking endless curiosity in the viewer about the film’s many brave, brilliant, whimsical women."

Spectacular Optical

"Geek Girls considers the empowerment of self-identifying as a geek in order to look closely at the simultaneous costs and dangers of that label. Geek Girls makes geek misogyny uncomfortably visible."

Pause Button

"An account of the abuses endured within the culture and a call to action to form new bonds within the community and fight back."

Carbon Arc

"Explores what it means to be a female nerd and how the role of this identification within popular culture is changing."

Shooting People

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

  • Cleveland International Film Festival
  • Virginia Film Festival
  • Sheffield Film Festival
  • Urbanworld Film Festival
  • FIN Atlantic Film Festival
  • SciFi Film Festival
  • Central Scotland Documentary
  • Festival and Grand River Film Festival
  • Norrkoping Film Festival

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Gina Hara

Gina Hara is a Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker and artist with a background in art & technology, interested in the experimental aspects and transmedial forms of visual culture. She holds an MA in intermedia, an MFA in film production and had worked in different media with regard to film, video, new media, gaming and design. Her short Waning (2011) was nominated for Best Canadian Short at the Toronto International Film Festival. Her latest project Your Place or Minecraft (2016) is a machinima docu web series about game studies, available on YouTube. (9/17)

Michael Massicotte

Michael Massicotte is an independent producer, primarily working on documentary films. His latest production, Geek Girls (2017), premiered in Official Competition at the 2017 Sheffield Doc/Fest in the United Kingdom. The film is confirming its festival route; it screened in Montreal at the 2017 Fantasia International Film Festival and won Best Documentary Feature Film Bronze Prize award. Geek Girls has also played in Sweden, the United States, Scotland, and other festivals around the world. (6/1*

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