Pandora's Box: The Living Archive of Feminist Moving Image Culture, with a screening of The Long Road to the Director's Chair (Vibeke Løkkeberg, 2025)
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
This evening event closes a day of 'feminist intelligence gathering', marking the initial stage in Pandora's Box: The Living Archive of Feminist Moving Image Culture, an ongoing collective project dedicated to recovering, reactivating and thinking about feminist film history.
We are screening The Long Road to the Director's Chair, a 2025 film made by Vibeke Løkkeberg.
In 1973, Norwegian filmmaker and former actress Løkkeberg attended the First International Women's Film Seminar in Berlin, bringing a camera crew to document this pivotal early feminist film movement gathering. The footage she shot then disappeared for nearly 50 years.
Rediscovered and edited into a feature-length documentary, The Long Road to the Director's Chair draws on this unearthed archive to build a narrative of women entering a male-dominated industry — their working conditions, positions and arguments explored in close detail through interviews with pioneering filmmakers from around the world.
More than a historical record, the film treats its recovered footage as testimony, bridging the debates of 1973 — over representation, authorship and access — with today's ongoing conversations about gender equality in the arts. Fusing archival material with documentary craft, the film is a direct and often challenging account of women organising for a place in the industry, and of how far those debates still have to run.
We will start with a pre-recorded message from the director, and conclude with a Q&A chaired by Dr Selina Robertson (Club des Femmes).
Contact name: Matthew Barrington
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