Luke Fowler and Mark Fell’s film revolves around the testimonies and collected documents linked to the complex and often contested history of Pavilion, Europe’s first feminist photography centre. To the Editor of Amateur Photographer examines a radical shift in photography whilst also foregrounding the problems of presenting history through archival fragments and personal recollections. Operating out of former park premises in Leeds, Pavilion was formed in 1983 with the stated aim of being the first photography centre dedicated to representing and supporting the production of women’s photography. Against a backdrop of heightened social, political and economic conflicts, the Pavilion set about turning the prevailing patriarchal image culture inside-out.

The work of four women filmmakers - Tina Keane, Annabel Nicolson, Joanna Davis and Lis Rhodes - is juxtaposed in the context of the work of Circles, a women’s distribution, exhibition and research group. The group emphasises screenings with discussion involving the filmmakers and the audience. On the issue of women’s exclusion from mainstream production and the questions of gender, culture and society, the approach is allusive rather than analytic or polemic. Works of two early women filmmakers - Alice Guy’s A House Divided (1913) and Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922) are presented as unacknowledged or misrepresented. The effect of the filmmakers’ discussion of their aims and methods is open-ended and inconclusive but suggestive of what a women’s cinema can mean.

Circles - the subject of Seeing for Ourselves - and Cinema of Women (both formed in the early 1980s), merged in 1991 into Cinenova. Cinenova is a charity dedicated to preserving and distributing the work of women/feminist film and video makers. Since 2001, Cinenova is run by volunteers dedicated to the constellation of films, histories and politics that make up Cinenova. www.cinenova.org