TMU professor digs into the long history of feminist media in feature documentary
Professor Emeritus Marusya Bociurkiw’s new feature-length documentary, Analogue Revolution: How Feminist Media Changed the World, will be screening twice at Hot Docs cinema this March.
In the lead up to International Women’s Day and to mark the beginning of this year’s Women’s History Month, the TMU community can head to the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema here in Toronto to see professor emiterus Marusya Bociurkiw’s new feature-length documentary, Analogue Revolution: How Feminist Media Changed the World.
An archival image of professor Marusya Bociurkiw from behind the camera with Emma Productions.
Deeply embedded within feminist media in Canada since the ‘80s, and as the founder of the feminist video collective Emma Productions, Bociurkiw wanted to create a digital archive of the feminist media that has furthered the struggle for gender rights in Canada. Her film is both a love letter to those involved in the steadfast work of the past, and a rallying cry for those taking up the work now.
"This film is a way for me to mentor younger women so that hopefully they can access this film as an archive, and that it can continue the conversation."
Stories featured within the film include TMU alumni, like Theo J. Cuthand (Master of Arts in Media Production ‘15) whose ’90s DIY film Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory, covers the deeply personal story of being a high school student wishing they knew more lesbians, Image Arts alumna Ella Cooper, who created Black Women Film! to mentor Black women in media, and Nicki Gill and Arti Patel, Journalism graduates who talk about being the only brown women in the newsroom.
Looking at the evolution of media
From Halifax to Vancouver, Bociurkiw gives us an archival look at how printing houses, collectives and organizations formed and thrived as a reaction to feminists’ lack of access to mainstream media.
“It was very hard to get into print because publishers didn’t want you to get into anything systemic, you had to have a scoop and you couldn’t write about something if it happened to you,” says Susan G. Cole, a lesbian activist who worked with the Broadside Feminist Review, a feminist paper based in Toronto between 1979 and 1989, who is featured in the film.
By the late 1980s, there were almost 1,000 feminist and women's periodicals, newsletters, magazines and journals across Canada and dozens of radio shows.
The film delves into the history and evolution of these outlets, but Bociurkiw also wanted to shed light on how feminist media was so integral to the struggle for women’s rights, including reproductive rights, labour activism and internationalism in Canada. “This film is a way for me to mentor younger women so that hopefully they can access this film as an archive, and that it can continue the conversation.”
From those that came before to those that will lead now
A major source of inspiration for the film was her students, says Bociurkiw.
“I taught media theory and documentary production and–specifically–social justice and activist media, and I was always very surprised that my students knew little or nothing about feminism,” she says. “And often if they did, they had stereotypes of feminism as wholly liberal, entirely white, and this thinking obscures the fact that this was a really diverse network of organizations that often came together to create powerful legislative and social change.”
So Analogue Revolution forms a repository of the feminist movement’s past, and the change it helped enact.
And there’s no better time to take lessons from the past; as Bociurkiw was doing some of the interviewing for the film, Roe v. Wade had just been overturned.
“So that's why we need archives, because we’re going to keep fighting these battles again and again, and we don't have time to reinvent the wheel [on strategy],” she says. “The work needs to be intergenerational, we need to see a transfer of ideas and knowledge.”
The work continues
Following the March 2 screening, there will be a panel discussion, moderated by filmmaker and professor Min Sook Lee and featuring some of the film’s interviewees, including TMU alumni.
For Bociurkiw, this continued conversation is one of the greatest strengths of the work. “The film has had eight screenings across Canada, and there's always really great discussion afterward, often about the importance of archives,” she says. “So the conversation and the work continues. I always used to say to my students, ‘it’s not research if it doesn’t surprise you,’ and my biggest surprise with the film was that feminism never stopped. Even in the face of cutbacks and technological change, women took their feminism into other places.”
Analogue Revolution screens at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema on Saturday March 2, at 6:30 p.m. and Sunday, March 3 at 1:30 p.m. The TMU community can buy tickets on their website (external link) . For more information, or to schedule your own screening of the film, contact Marusya Bociurkiw.