Breaking Plates

EU15,000 cash & accomodation awarded as a Screendance production residency funded by La Briqueterie and Adami (France)

Proposed as 'Smashing Dishes' and later changed to 'Breaking Plates', this film is a unique remix of silent film footage with contemporary performance. It slams together the anarchy and gender play of women of the 1920s, with the fury, irony, and sly humour of women in the 2020s, putting performers in the present in conversation with the past>. We ask the energetic and creative women of early film: What did you know? What can we learn from you? And why are we so much more polite?

In conceptualising the project, I am working with feminist film scholars and curators Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Hurok, drawing on the female driven silent film clips they have recovered and restored into a collection they call ‘Cinema's First Nasty Women’ (due out on Blu-Ray in 2022).