In the NOVEMBER edition, we’ll be talking about Kathryn Bigelow’s underrated science fiction thriller Strange Days, which was originally released on 13 October 1995 in the US and worldwide in February 1996. In part a response to the police brutality of the LA Riots, Strange Days is a complex film about memory, addiction, and the desire to escape reality…

In the OCTOBER episode, we are joined by Dr Anna McFarlane (University of Glasgow), and we’ll be talking about recent women-directed SF with a focus on ReproFutures: imagined near futures of pregnancy, gestation, childbirth and child rearing. We’re focusing on recent films, The Pod Generation, written and directed by Sophie Barthes (who also made Cold Souls), and Fleur Fortuné’s The Assessment.

We're back! On Coralie Fargeat's The Substance (2024) and Ninagawa Mika's Helter Skelter (2012) - re/introducing the project, talking about the films as science fiction and their approach to the male/female gaze, bodies and women in the film industry.

With Scott Midson (a man!) we chat about I'm Your Man (2021) and Making Mr. Right (1987).

This is our second episode in a row with a guest! This week we welcome Indian filmmaker Arati Kadav whose Hindi-language SF Cargo was our more recent #WomenMakeSF film, which is notably the first Indian SF genre film directed by a woman. We are so excited to have the writer and director here to answer our questions! Cargo combines references to lots of key SF texts and a retro-futuristic analog aesthetic, with a distinctly Indian narrative that places reincarnation in a science fictional setting. We think about why women are often led to producing original low-budget content rather than also being allowed into the realms of franchise, and why women deserve their own science fictions. Women read, write, watch, play, and make science fiction - why can’t we shake the stereotype?

This week’s episode is our first look at the work of the Wachowski sisters - Lily and Lana - who are the most prolific SF creators on the WMSF list with their work expanding across several platforms. We watched Jupiter Ascending (Wachowskis) - our first screening since September - and are both avid fans of Sense8. We are joined this week by our special guest science fiction critic, writer, editor, and publisher Cheryl Morgan. After a run of fairly serious space and science/fiction films we wanted to watch some pure space opera - but this is a Wachowski storyworld it was never going to be that simple... 

This week we are talking about women in space. How have space movies imagined women’s participation in space exploration and travel? Our cultural imaginaries have not always made space for women in space - despite the early SF positioning of women as part of humanity’s journey to the stars, much of contemporary SF see women as support for the male mastery of technologies and machines. We talk about #WomenMakeSF movies Aniara a Swedish SF directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, Claire Denis’ English language debut High Life alongside key examples like Gravity, Interstellar, and Alien. 

This week we are looking at the film Paradise Hills and Level 16 both films are set at dystopian finishing schools where being the perfect girl is the goal. These young women are trapped in the trappings of femininity and sacrificed in the pursuit of an apparent notion of female perfection. We discuss this in relation to a recent TIME article that argues that women's genre filmmaking is “about women’s deepest anxieties”. Content warning: discussion of rape culture and violence against women.

Guest Katie Heffner is a PhD student at the University of Kent, supervised by Prof. Charlotte Sleigh, researching women’s participation in fandom in the early 20th century. She received a Masters in Library and Information Science with a concentration on digital archives at the University of Iowa in 2019. Her honors thesis for her Bachelors degree in English Literature explores how fandom practices such as fanzines can be used within classrooms.

The sea merges myth and science - both a source of deep fear (and thus myth) and massive rewards (and thus science). In SF the oceans can be a space of imagined futures, a frontier, and a dangerous yet bountiful environment. We noticed a trend in the women directed movies we have been watching that focus around the theme of the sea and water, so this episode explores the sea in women made SF and the mythic connection between science, the sea, and female experiences.