Sandra Lahire

'Sandra Lahire (1950-2001) was a central member of the feminist and experimental filmmaking community in London in the 1980s and 1990s. 

She made ten 16mm films, most of them under half an hour in length. Hers is an important body of work that deserves wider recognition – its environmental concerns, its intersectional feminism, its honest discussion of mental health feel poignantly modern and relevant today.  Marked by corporeal vulnerability – her own, that of the female body, the body of the earth, the body of film – Lahire’s work proposes a comparison between the violence committed by patriarchal society against women and that committed by humans against the non-human world. Her four anti-nuclear films echo the feminist anti-nuclear, anti-war movement at the time. Formally, they merge documentary, performance, animation and experimentation (superimposition – both in camera and on the optical printer – re-filming, colourisation, changes of speed, layering of sounds).

From her first film to her last, Lahire was in sustained dialogue with the poetry and archive of Sylvia Plath. And like Sylvia Plath’s, hers is a body of work that is retrospectively overshadowed by her premature death aged 50. Lahire’s films were ground-breaking in the frank way that they addressed the unspoken cultural causes of diseases such as anorexia, with which she struggled throughout her life and which led to her untimely passing in 2001.'

Courtisane Film Festival, 2021.