ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the conditions for Canadian and Swedish women filmmakers in relation to cultural movements, politics, and policy during the long 1970s, a concept connecting geopolitical and socio-cultural commonalities across Western Europe and North America from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. In Canada and Sweden, this era is known as the peak period of welfare state policies. By discussing the concurrent and divergent evolution of public support for film and cultural production in both countries, which interacted with influential women’s movements, a growing feminist emphasis on gender equality and children’s rights, the intersection between feminist media works and international diplomacy efforts in environmentalism, pacifism, and women’s rights, and both countries’ self-imagination as “Third Way Social Democracies,” the chapter traces the emergence of a number of prominent women filmmakers in both countries. Their careers were facilitated by increased women’s organizing through film festivals, collectives, community centers, and activist organizations, as well as by changing film production conditions in the private and public sectors in their respective countries, while many of these women filmmakers also contributed directly to domestic capacity building, international networking, and articulations of competing political agendas. These actions, demonstrated through a wide array of forms of production, often worked within and sometimes against welfare state priorities, and constitute important but largely overlooked aspects of the evolution of film industries in both countries.
