Blog posts by Ania Ostrowska: 2012
All you get for the end of the world is... codependent lesbian space aliens!
by Ania Ostrowska // 21 December 2012, 10:21
I would like to celebrate what may well turn out to be the very last day on planet Earth with a review of a recent film that offers a science fiction way out: a move to planet Zots, where the...
New review: The Weight
by Ania Ostrowska // 12 December 2012, 11:57
You probably know, whether you like it or not, what 'Gangnam Style' is. A K-Pop (Korean Pop) single, released by South Korean musician PSY in July 2012, has been mentioned endlessly in popcultural context since then. The official YouTube...
New review: Hit So Hard: the life and near-death story of Patty Schemel
by Ania Ostrowska // 4 December 2012, 10:17
Hit So Hard: the life and near-death story of Patty Schemel is a 2011 documentary by P. David Ebersole that tells a story of Hole, one of the most exciting female-lead rock bands of the 1990s. What is extraordinary about...
New review and COMPETITION: Lawrence of Arabia
by Ania Ostrowska // 28 November 2012, 10:05
Among other things, December 2012 is the 50th anniversary of the theatrical release of David's Lean Lawrence of Arabia, a Hollywood epic that unfolds over almost four hours and is an ambivalent account of British officer T.E. Lawrence's exploits in...
First ever London Feminist Film Festival opens in Hackney on Thursday
by Ania Ostrowska // 27 November 2012, 12:24
With many screenings sold out already, a vibrant website featuring interviews with filmmakers and a four day programme packed full of films from around the world, the first ever London Feminist Film Festival opens on Thursday at the Hackney...
Underwire Film Festival: celebrating shorts by women. At the Ritzy until Saturday!
by Ania Ostrowska // 21 November 2012, 00:26
UnderWire festival opened last night for the third time. It was launched in 2010 by Gabriella Apicella and Gemma Mitchell who believed that women working in the UK film industry needed more encouragement and a bigger platform for their work....
New review: Welcome to the World
by Ania Ostrowska // 17 November 2012, 20:34
In November DocHouse screened four (out of total eight) films from the Why Poverty? series. Why Poverty? is a project run by a non-profit organisation that combines documentaries, new media, old media and outreach to get millions of people talking...
New review: Compliance
by Ania Ostrowska // 9 November 2012, 08:02
"You may have already heard about Craig Zobel's Compliance - or more likely about the audience walk-outs that it received," writes Charlotte Rowland in our latest film review. She has a point here. After its premiere at this year's...
New review: The cinema of Christopher Nolan
by Ania Ostrowska // 24 October 2012, 10:05
About a year ago a post from Social Justice League blog went viral (and gets new comments until today!). It is titled 'How to be a fan of problematic things' and does exactly what it says on the tin, in...
New double review: Bumming in Beijing and Oxhide II
by Ania Ostrowska // 16 October 2012, 10:09
For two weeks in September 2012 The Screen @ RADA and Birkbeck Cinema hosted the first ever London Chinese Independent Film Festival. The festival programme featured nine independent films and documentaries from mainland China and its aim was, in the...
New review: Sally Potter's Ginger and Rosa
by Ania Ostrowska // 10 October 2012, 10:24
The 56th BFI London Film Festival opens today, featuring more than 200 feature films as well as many documentaries, shorts, talks and masterclasses over 12 days. One of the films in the official competition is Ginger and Rosa by...
DocHouse RESISTENCIA: Focus on Latin America minifest (plus new review)
by Ania Ostrowska // 21 September 2012, 11:00
DocHouse is a year-round festival of weekly showcase documentary screenings in UK cinemas, bringing its audiences the best of international and UK documentary as well as masterclasses and education partnerships. RESISTENCIA: Focus on Latin America mini festival, taking place...
Paula Milne: the personal as political season at BFI Southbank
by Ania Ostrowska // 4 September 2012, 12:00
Starting this Thursday, BFI Southbank will be hosting a season devoted to British screenwriter Paula Milne, known most recently for this year's BBC series White Heat and 2011 television adaptation of Sarah Lucas' The Night Watch. Beginning as a script...
New review: Hitchcock's Vertigo
by Ania Ostrowska // 31 August 2012, 16:01
"I doubt there is a single film-goer who has never heard about Alfred Hitchcock," opens Agata Frymus her review of Vertigo for The F-Word. Well, if there is, BFI Southbank steps in to rectify it, at least for Londoners...
New review: Brave
by Ania Ostrowska // 21 August 2012, 14:51
Whether we like it or not, the planet of films made for girls is almost entirely colonised by princesses and sparkly pink princess culture overflows the screen, putting mothers of adolescent daughters under pressure to turn their female offsprings into...
Jafar Panahi and Mohamad Rasoulof at BFI Southbank (plus COMPETITION!)
by Ania Ostrowska // 5 August 2012, 11:11
This is a guest post by Sophie Mayer. She is the author of The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love, and a regular contributor to The F-Word and Sight & Sound. This is Not a Film (2011) is...
Kodak Girls: The Suffragettes, Photography and the Silver Screen
by Ania Ostrowska // 24 July 2012, 15:16
This is a guest post by Nigel Shephard from Gypsy Gold Films. I am an independent filmmaker in the middle of raising funding for my first feature documentary, Banners and Broad Arrows. It tells the story of the suffragette movement...
New review: Three Veils
by Ania Ostrowska // 23 July 2012, 23:18
With her second feature Three Veils Rolla Selbak, Arab-American filmmaker from the United Arab Emirates now working in the US, set off to make "an inspirational film women all over the world can relate to". The film focuses on...
New feature: Bipolar disorder and suicide
by Ania Ostrowska // 15 July 2012, 11:32
According to the research published in peer-reviewed journals, lifetime rates of suicide attempts among persons with bipolar disorder is 29.2%. In her candid article, Karen Rhodes shares her personal story behind scientific data. Karen is completing MA in Women's Studies...
New review: Snow White and the Huntsman
by Ania Ostrowska // 9 July 2012, 00:10
The fairytale Snow White is the subject of not one but two cinematic adaptations this year. Rupert Sanders' Snow White and the Huntsman treads a darker path to Tarsem Singh's Mirror Mirror. Director's first full-length film is a strong debut;...
The 4th Annual POUT Film Festival 2012: 21-23 June
by Ania Ostrowska // 20 June 2012, 07:30
Presented by Peccadillo Pictures, this year's POUT film festival is proud to bring you an eclectic mix of quality LGBT and queer-friendly movies. The festival screenings will take place in London's Apollo Piccadilly Cinema on Regent Street from Thursday...
Career Girls on TV: illustrated lecture by Dr Rachel Moseley
by Ania Ostrowska // 19 June 2012, 14:43
On Wednesday 20 June (tomorrow), BFI Southbank will host a lecture by Dr Rachel Moseley, Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies from Warwick University, exploring British TV's representation of women in the workplace since the 1960s. Reminding us...
New review: Joanna Hogg, a very British outsider
by Ania Ostrowska // 24 May 2012, 10:40
The work of Joanna Hogg was selected to feature in the recent BFI season Made in Britain, focusing on British women filmmakers. Her cinematic (as distinguished from television and promotional) output comprises two feature films only, Unrelated and Archipelago....
She Monkeys opens in London and Dublin
by Ania Ostrowska // 16 May 2012, 15:28
Swedish director Lisa Aschan's last year's début feature She Monkeys (Apflickorna) is coming to selected London cinemas on Friday 18 May (and to the Irish Film Institute in Dublin a week later). Please see Peccadillo Pictures' website for details....
Where have all Cannes women directors gone?
by Ania Ostrowska // 15 May 2012, 23:44
Arguably the most prestigious (and indisputably most glamorous) film festival in the world opens tomorrow in Cannes, the French Riviera. As it is the Festival's 65th birthday, no-one else but iconic (and resurrected) Marilyn Monroe blows the candles on...
New review: Avengers Assemble
by Ania Ostrowska // 9 May 2012, 09:54
Avengers Assemble, the latest film adaptation of the Marvel comics universe, is taking global box office by storm, or, more to the point, is properly Hulk-smashing its way to the top. With staggering $200.3m (£124m), it is the biggest US...
Jean Gabin: Working Class Hero to Godfather season at BFI Southbank plus COMPETITION
by Ania Ostrowska // 30 April 2012, 13:24
Throughout May BFI Southbank celebrates a career of French actor Jean Gabin (1904-1976), one of the iconic stars of French cinema, spanning over four decades. If we keep in mind that investigations into constructions of masculinity are yet another...
New review: Circumstance
by Ania Ostrowska // 24 April 2012, 22:40
"From an early age, I have been a translator of culture: East for West, and West for East," writes Maryam Keshavarz, director, producer and writer of Circumstance. She writes of how she grew up with Iranians burning American flags...
New review - A place of rage: two black feminist documentaries
by Ania Ostrowska // 21 April 2012, 21:36
From the 1990s onwards, feminist sociologists have been using the term 'intersectionality' to suggest that multiple socio-biological categories (like race, gender, class, ability, sexuality etc.) work together to create a web of oppression in which we are entangled. Lola Okolosie...
New review double act: The Hunger Games
by Ania Ostrowska // 17 April 2012, 15:48
"Panem, mockingjay, Katniss and Peeta - if these words are unfamiliar to you now, they soon won't be," predicts Jessica Blunden in her review of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy. She might be right: the series has already...
Win Tickets to the Made in Britain season at the BFI Southbank (2 - 30 April)
by Ania Ostrowska // 28 March 2012, 00:27
The BFI Southbank are offering The F-Word readers the chance to win one of three pairs of tickets to their contemporary British cinema season. The first instalment of this new annual series is dedicated to bold contemporary British female...
New review: The Princess and the Frog
by Ania Ostrowska // 18 March 2012, 12:50
Back in 1975, in the autumn edition of Screen magazine, the article was published that became the cornerstone of the strand of (feminist and not only) film theory informed by psychoanalysis. Laura Mulvey (who still teaches film theory at...
New review: Barbara Hammer at Tate Modern
by Ania Ostrowska // 19 February 2012, 16:35
"It's pretty hard not to fall in love with Barbara Hammer," says Sophie Mayer in her review of Hammer's retrospective in Tate Modern, ending 26 February. I think many of those who attended any of 15 film programmes screened...
New review: 9 Bob Note
by Ania Ostrowska // 8 February 2012, 18:31
The London borough of Lambeth, 21st century. A drag queen in full attire and a woman in burka get stuck in a lift together... A cheap trick, you say? Perhaps watching Faryal Velmi's funny and pointed short film What You...
New review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
by Ania Ostrowska // 20 January 2012, 00:03
Lisbeth Salander is back, with a vengeance. While some of you might be asking: "Lisbeth who??", the others have been familiar with her since 2008, when the first volume of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,...
Founder of The F-Word, Catherine Redfern, has co-authored a new book with Kristin Aune. Find out more at the 
