ABSTRACT
The Origins of This Book When we first came together in 1998, we realized that we shared a desire to refocus on women's filmmaking – to take stock of what has occurred, what has been gained, and what directions feminist film theory has taken since the early 1970s. At that time, a lost history of women's filmmaking resurfaced in film festivals and the first feminist film journals appeared, provoking excitement and debate. We wanted to recreate that initial excitement by organizing an international women's film conference, along with a women's film festival. This book is the final stage in a series of projects that arose from our first meeting, including the events entitled "Women Filmmakers: Refocusing," held in Vancouver in March 1999.1 We designed the conference-festival to cross several boundaries – between disciplines, between countries, between theory and practice, between universities and the community, and between those who make films and those who see and write about them. Our own backgrounds have been conducive to achieving this dialogue: Jacqueline Levitin is a filmmaker and scholar attached to the School for the Contemporary Arts and the Women's Studies Department at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver; Judith Plessis is the Director of Language Programs in Continuing Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, and her doctorate in Comparative Literature focused on women filmmakers; Valerie Raoul is in French and Women's Studies at UBC, and she has an interest in feminist film theory and francophone filmmakers. We saw this as a unique opportunity to pool the resources of our two local universities in order to bring together both local and international filmmakers and academics. We were delighted by the interest our initial call for papers aroused and the quality of the many proposals we received – any fears we had beforehand that the enthusiasm might no longer be there were soon allayed.
