News

Here you’ll find updates on FMRG members’ research and practice activities. From filmmaking via public events to academic writing, our work spans a broad range of media and speaks to a variety of audiences.

Appearances

Jenny Chamarette participated in a plenary dialogue with Professor Rachel Garfield on the Dwoskin Project at Art & the Critical Medical Humanities, RCA, and an invited panel at Charleston Festival of the Garden with Marchell Farrell and Sarah Rigby on allotments and radical politics.

Rebecca Harrison contributed a keynote session for the British Association of American Studies in April 2024. In ‘The Fallout from Barbenheimer,’ she explored nuclear aesthetics, gender representation, and the ecological impacts of both Barbie (2023) and Oppenheimer (2023).

Ben Winters presented a paper at the OU Music and Literature Research Group’s ‘Words, Music, and Silence’ symposium at Bournemouth University in June 2024. It was entitled ‘Reading Text on Screen: Aspect Ratios, Musical Synchronization, and Star Wars.’

Ben has also been invited to give the keynote lecture in November 2024 at the ‘Editing Film Music: Challenges of Multimediality’ conference at Goethe University in Frankfurt in association with the Erich Wolfgang Korngold Werkausgab (for which he’s an advisory editor).

Articles and books

Jenny Chamarette, ‘Dwoskin, Diaspora, Dysphoria,’ Jewish Film & New Media 10, no.1 (2023): 81-118.

Kaya Davies Hayon and Stefanie Van De Peer (eds), Transnational Arab Stardom: Glamour, Performance, Politics (London: Bloomsbury, 2024).

Mark Fryers, ‘A chilling story from today’s headlines:’ Community, Maritime Apocalypse and Discourses of Eco-Dystopia’s in Doomwatch (1972), Revenant, 10, 2024.

Mark Fryers, 'The Sea as Death: Ghosts, Nick Broomfield, 2006,' in Death in the 21st Century: A Companion, Peter Lang, Simon Bacon & Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon, eds. 2024.

Awards

Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon’s short film About the Night (2024) has won numerous accolades, including Best Story at The British International Film Festival. It has also been nominated for Best Narrative Short Film at the Miami Women Film Festival and New York Arthouse Film Festival, and for Best Female Director at the European Short Awards. It received an Honorary Mention in the Best Screen-Based Practice Research Award (short) at the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) conference.

Rebecca Harrison contributed the chapter ‘I Won’t Look: Refusing to Engage with Gender-Based Violence in Women-Led Screen Media,’ to Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge (eds), Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence (London: Routledge, 2023). The book won Best Edited Collection at the 2024 Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies (MeCSSA) awards.

Creative practice

Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon’s short film About the Night has been touring film festivals and academic conferences. Exemplifying her practice-led research in fiction filmmaking, it captures the subtle beauty of small acts of kindness and the unexpected human connections that blossom in the intimate setting of a late-night café. Through the project, Lee-Jane explores collaborative storytelling in fiction production, pushing the boundaries of narrative form and challenging the conventions of cinematic storytelling.

Amy Charlesworth is working on the restoration project for A Woman Like You, a 1976 film by Sheffield Film Co-op. This 18-minute film mixes documentary techniques with dramatized scenes about access to pregnancy termination in the NHS. Funded by The Open University, Amy Charlesworth has worked with Charlotte Procter, a film archivist at Cinenova. With thanks to Sheffield Film Co-op, BFI, R3Store and Collective Text.

Matthew Holley has created an excellent resource for anyone thinking about editing software – especially for teachers and lecturers wondering what package might work best for students. You can read his findings and recommendations here: [make attached PDF available to download].

Les Levidow and project collaborators have been creating digital storytelling about group food-growing. Full details of the project (‘Local Food-Growing Initiatives Respond to the Covid-19 Crisis: Enhancing Well-Being, Building Community for Better Futures’), and video links can be found on Les’s webpage.

Public, press, and industry engagement

Since 2022, Jenny Chamarette is co-principal investigator on the care-led curatorial project How Do You Feel Cinema?, which is in collaboration with Research England, the University of Reading, British Film Institute, and Independent Cinema Office.

Rebecca Harrison’s AHRC-funded Environmental Impact of Filmmaking project explores the ecological footprint of the Star Wars franchise. With research associate Siti Syuhaida Mohamed Yunus, Rebecca investigated carbon emissions from practical vs digital Artoo Detoos, the ‘Throne Room’ dress, and lightsaber props and toys. The project’s findings have been reported in the press, and Rebecca is working with a variety of organisations to support greener practices. She’s currently running a survey on people’s experiences of location shoots, and is making a film about sites across the UK that appear in Star Wars.

Forthcoming work

Keep an eye out for these publications in coming months…

Kaya Davies Hayon, Tom Martin and Michelle Walsh (eds), ⵜⴰⵖⵓⵔⴰⵔⵜ - Gender, Ethnicity and Desertification in Amazigh Women’s Photography (Emerald Publishing, 2025). Funded by an Emerald Publishing Real Impact Award, this participatory photography project used co-produced creative strategies to understand the impact of climate change on Amazigh women in Morocco. The forthcoming co-created photobook will showcase images the women produced in photography workshops in November 2022.

Kaya is also working on a book project with Stephanie Hemelryk Donald. Motherhood, Sorcery and the Failure of Justice in Saint Omer will examines Alice Diop’s groundbreaking procedural drama Saint Omer (2022).

Mark Fryers has two books in production. The Woman in Black (with Marcus Harmes, Devil's Advocates: Liverpool University Press) and The Cybernetic Imagination Revisited (co-edited with Marcus Harmes, Peter Lang) are both due in 2025.

Ben Winters, Korngold in America: Music, Myth, and Hollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025).