Author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

To say that in recent years that broader amorphous beast loosely called “the film industry” has been the centre of often high-profile discourse about gender inequality is an understatement. Beginning in 2017, t...

Originally published in Senses of Cinema issue 80, September 2016. “You know the money shots in porn films? Well, this was just a different substance: it was red” – Director Roberta Findlay on the relationshi...

One way of thinking about Peter Strickland’s works is as baubles of obsession. They are little spheres of influence, spheres of logic that marry fecund dialogue and audiovisual atmosphere with field recordings ...

In a cultural and industrial landscape significantly altered by the barrage of sexual-abuse and harassment allegations against now-notorious Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in late 2017 that sparked the #Me...

Amongst the 260 odd pages of Kathy Acker’s 1993 experimental novel My Mother: Demonology, somewhere near the front of that iconic postmodern feminist writer’s book is featured a chapter called “Clit City”. Fram...

Rape-revenge films directed by women are a rarity, and rape-revenge comedies even rarer; somehow, connecting the two, we find queen of the Czech avant-garde Věra Chytilová and her 1998 film Pasti, pasti, pastič...

The great misnomer that “everything is online” revealed to me once again how flawed an assumption it is about a year ago when I was thinking through my earliest memories of Australian women filmmakers. I feel I...

This dossier coincides with retrospectives of the work of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani at the Melbourne International Film Festival and the Queensland Film Festival in July and August, 2018. This dossier is ...

Our planet has provided the most beautiful and ever changing natural landscapes in the form of mountains, oceans, forests and deserts. Human beings remain astonished by these variegated marvels of nature, sculp...

Catalan filmmaker José Ramón Larraz’s psychological horror film Symptoms – a UK production – was the British entry at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974. Despite this, the film was considered all but lost for dec...

This is how the story goes: iconic shock-goth-glam-rock darling Marilyn Manson once tried to make a film about Lewis Carroll and Alice’s Wonderland tales, but so outraged were the public by the trailer alone th...

The first dedicated film magazine I ever bought was in March 1988, Issue #68 of the Australian publication Cinema Papers. Nick Cave was on the cover to promote the release of John Hillcoat’s Ghosts… of the Civi...