You are cordially invited to a screening of documentary film Independent Miss Craigie at the Watershed cinema 23 March 2022, from 6pm. The film is about renowned early female British documentary filmmaker Jill Craigie. Independent Miss Craigie is part of a recent AHRC-funded project tracing Craigie’s contributions to British cinema.

We will be joined by the director, Professor Lizzie Thynne (University of Sussex) who will provide a brief introduction and undertake a Q&A following the screening, in conversation with Professor Sarah Street (University of Bristol).  

Further information is provided below, and you can book your tickets here: https://www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/11155/independent-miss-craigie 

Abstract

Jill Craigie (1911-99) was one of the first women to direct documentaries in the UK.  Working outside the British Documentary Movement in the 1940s and early 1950s, her films such as To Be Woman (1951), on equal pay, and Out of Chaos (1944), the first film about artists at work, featuring Henry Moore and Paul Nash.  Independent Miss Craigie uses its subject's own films extensively as well as other fiction and progaganda of the period to reflect on, and contextualize, her life and career.  It draws on the director's unseen papers, along with her films letters, and photographs to reveal her energetic struggles to ger her radical films made and distributed.  Dual narrative voices - from actual interviews and from a script performed by Hayley Alwell - evoke the split between Craigie's persona as a young, apparently confident film-maker and her later dismissal of her work.  The person to represent women's experiences and subjectivities, perviously marginalized within the British Documentary Movement.

If you would like to watch The Way We Live as a complement to this screening, it is available for free on the BFI Player