‘There is Always More to be Distributed Than the Works Themselves’: On the Possibility of Militancy in and beyond Film Distribution

To say that our current conjuncture is marked by an outright counterrevolutionary frenzy is not an overstatement. This has partly materialised in the wake of a broad-based vilification of the capacity for militancy, which I take to be a call to mobilise politically and affectively on all fronts in the direction of  dismantling the chronic depravity of the coeval global order and collectively articulating other ways of living and knowing. The following preliminary thoughts were prompted by an invitation from Cinenova to respond to their comprehensive distribution catalogue which comprises the work of feminist film and video makers. Now seems like a chiefly appropriate time to probe the front where militancy and film meet.  

When it comes to cinema, the subject of militancy is often invoked in the past tense and taken up monolithically, specifically to cover the revolutionary struggles of the second half of the 20th century and the concomitant film practices that sought to oppose the political and aesthetic paradigms shaped by the sinister forces of colonialism and capitalism. During the 1960s and throughout the 1980s, many such films – spanning forms including fiction, documentary features, newsreels, experimental films, as well as guerilla and agitprop projects – were actively solicited in the context of Tricontinental unity for the liberatory principles they declared. The instrumentalisation of film by political groups and cultural committees not only informed the process of production but also determined the scope and circuits of distribution which, in many cases, were expressed through a combination of local and global networks that considered cultural production a critical front in the fight for liberation. This is what Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray have termed ‘the cine-geography of the militant image’ and which they defined as ‘situated cinecultural practices in an expanded sense, and the connections – individual, institutional, aesthetic and political – that link them transnationally to other situations of urgent struggle’[1]. That is to say, the extent to which an image is militant is not exclusively a reflection of its content. Instead, militancy is crucially about how an image travels, where and amongst whom it lingers, and what it might possibly activate and inspire as it paves the way for forms of collective organising. 

The 1990s saw the systematic defanging of revolutionary movements. This phenomenon, as Eshun and Gray have noted, led many to ‘consign the idea of militancy to the trash icon of history’[2]: a brutal concession that has laid the groundwork for neoliberalism’s cardinal project of reform. The repercussions of this in the sector of film might best be summed up in an utterance that many have returned to, some in agreement, others not: at a conference sponsored by the BFI on African cinema in 1996, John Akomfrah declared the death of Third Cinema as far as its direct claim to militancy was concerned[3]. In a way, Akomfrah’s statement pontificates on the true paradox of the postcolonial condition which had a lot to do with the rupture that the struggle for independence had promised but subsequently withheld. Speaking to the aftermath of the coup that followed Ghana’s independence, Akomfrah describes “coming in at the end of the utopian pronouncement both of the original anti-colonial figures and the people who replaced them”[4]. For him, going back to Ghana in the 1980s to make a film about Kwame Nkrumah – the first President of Ghana – and his Convention People's Party (CPP) felt as if he had stepped into “a kind of war zone of memories”[5], further policed by the then-brand new ministry of information. Consequently, the fiction register provided the necessary cushioning for the chain of archival footage interspersed throughout the film. The protagonist in ‘Testament’ (1988) was exiled in the aftermath of the coup; she returned to Ghana twenty years later only to find herself wandering across afflicted landscapes unsure of how she might begin to mourn. This woman  – and her now diasporic status –  expresses an interminable return, one that formally structured the film and reflected the disenchantment with what Akomfrah referred to as “utopian”. It is this disenchantment with the utopian as a political proposition that led many of those making films in the 1980s to ‘redefine “third cinema”, to move it away from the militant posture.’[6]

It was in the wake of this critical period, in 1991, that Cinenova was founded in the United Kingdom. A merger between two women-led film distribution collectives, Cinema of Women and Circles, formed in 1979 and 1980 respectively, Cinenova was the byproduct of local and national budget cuts and came to exemplify the shift from state funding to self-sufficiency. Prior to the merger, the founders and members of Cinema of Women and Circles included film students involved in the larger feminist movement of the 1970s. For them, addressing the political questions that concerned them partly translated into the imperative of making and circulating images about, by and for women, thus opposing the hegemony of mainstream production and distribution pegged to the larger socio-economic infrastructure that they aimed to demystify in and beyond the film industry. The premise was simple: it wasn’t enough for women to make films, but to find and foster the appropriate avenues that would allow these works to circulate via screenings and to mobilise the different aspects of their reception. 

The film catalogue that was consolidated after the merger comprised 500 titles and covered a wide range of forms, formats, lengths and themes. Distribution happened at festivals and in showrooms, as well as in spaces including women’s centres, community group meetings and libraries. The critical juncture that led to the launch of Cinenova in its initial form reveals the strategic dimension of this merger as a means to withstand conditions that were deeply impacted by Thatcherism. To navigate this new phase, they had to become well-versed in the language of business plans, cost-effectiveness and thematic video packages. Learning about the different phases of Cinenova’s operations over the past 35 years, with some gaps in-between, allows us to consider the protracted stakes of this move, not only at the fiscal level, but also in terms of how this discrepancy in activity influenced the relationship between feminist organising and film collectivising. Over the past two decades, particularly following the cessation of regular funding in 2001, Cinenova refrained from acquiring new works and concentrated its efforts on fostering collaborations steered by a volunteer working group that acts as the de facto organizing committee. This format has ensured that the collection has not become an index of overlooked material limited to preservation efforts. Rather, it serves as an entry point for ample research which partly invites a rethinking of customary configurations of distribution and goes in tandem with diagnosing existing alliances and imagining new ones. In the 2017 reworking of Circles’ aims and objectives first written in 1980 by Felicity Sparrow, Cinenova replaced the epithet ‘women’, which had categorised the majority of their catalogue, with ‘feminist’, to accurately represent the artists and filmmakers who ‘identify variously as women, transgender, gender nonconforming and gender non-binary’[7]. They defined these revisions as ‘a process of re-contextualizing and reflecting on distribution from the angles of politics, desire and contingency rather than sticking to performing a delegated authority (‘on behalf of’), which the distribution contract implies… There is always more to be distributed than the works themselves’[8]. This ‘more’, however, does not mean excess. Rather, it points to both the residual and emerging materialisations of feminist commitment which, in striving to stay in tune with its time, surely has had to contend with myriad vicissitudes.

It is this dialectical tension between the residual and the emergent that I seek to underscore as I think about film distribution’s capacity to harness militancy. While perusing the sea of compelling entries in Cinenova’s catalogue, Mai Masri and Jean Chamoun’s ‘Women from South Lebanon’ (1986) instantly drew my attention, especially that it has been making the rounds in solidarity screenings globally amidst ongoing Zionist aggression across Lebanon. Shot and edited by Masri during the Israeli occupation of Lebanon’s southern towns and villages, this documentary is structured around the oral recollections of women including Khadijeh. Khadijeh’s testimony is shared in the film partly via reenactment and encapsulates the experience of Palestinian and Lebanese women, many of whom were abducted and imprisoned by the occupation for playing a central role in the resistance. ‘Women from South Lebanon’ centres the interview form, a device that undergirded many non-fiction films produced by Arab women during the same period and well into the early 2000s[9]. These works belong to a documentary lineage in which the interview, as Farah Atoui and Cynthia Kreichati recently wrote, ‘transforms one’s relationship to political struggle’. The interview’s transformative capacity surely has its roots in oral traditions which have historically been significant in feminist struggles. Not only is the interview ascribed a testimonial significance in oral accounts, it also mobilises the collective potential of speech acts; of what can transpire as knowledge to be shared and learned from, rather than as iterations of individual catharsis. 

To this point, Heiny Srour, whose narrative film ‘Leila and the Wolves’ (1984) was distributed by Cinenova until 2025, stated in an interview with Magda Wassef in 1978 that ‘Arab women have been silent for a very long time, so they have a lot to say about themselves, things that men have never said about them’[10]. Against this forced silence, Leila in ‘Leila and the Wolves’ travels in time to reveal, through a series of vignettes, the pivotal role that Palestinian and Lebanese women played in the history of the multifaceted resistance against the Zionist entity – a history from which they have often been omitted. This omission further exposes the patriarchal violence that Arab women faced throughout the 20th century and is demonstrated early on in the film in an exchange between Leila and her partner Rafiq who vainly denies the participation of women in anti-colonial resistance. Unfortunately, some of the comments that Srour has made publicly over the past two years have laid bare the discrepancy between the radical ethos behind her films and the liberal shift in her stance, especially when addressing the current moment of anti-colonial struggle.

This shortcoming brings us back full circle to Akomfrah’s aforementioned breach between militancy and film, to which he added: ‘So the intent to break this limb was in part, not for the political project, but for the cinema itself. To save it from itself' [11]. Insofar as the issue is not merely that of film proper, one might be tempted to ask: is a cinema that requires the total disavowal of militancy in order to be saved worth saving?  What Akomfrah might have meant here is that cinema should not be reduced to dogma. One  of his concerns was for “the dream of unity, of being twin, of being identical, having an interest that is absolutely the same” to overshadow the political proposition that film helps to forge. The interview format, however, has the capacity to upset what might come across as a preordained and foreclosed domain of politics whereby, in Atoui and Kreichati’s words, ‘the militant invitation to make oneself heard’ [12] becomes an opening towards political relationality.

Cinenova’s catalogue attests to the valence of the interview as a form that many filmmakers have explored in tandem with the larger ecology of feminist media practices. Pratibha Parmar’s film anthology recognises the interview as faithful in demonstrating queer kinship and feminist comradeship, from India to the crux of empire in the United Kingdom and the United States and beyond. Parmar’s ‘A Place of Rage’ (1991) has become a feminist classic, not only because it features pillars of the movement including Angela Davis and June Jordan, but also because the perilous present it warned against as well as the futurity it dreamed up remain as pertinent as ever. The systematic oppression described in ‘A Place of Rage’ is intertwined with the kind of carceral violence that ‘Women from South Lebanon’ demonstrates. These two films have become a living archive of an array of resistance politics and poetics in all the contradictions they expose as well as the continuities they attest to. In ‘Women from South Lebanon’, Khadijeh tells the story of how, during one of the harshest moments of her imprisonment by the Israeli occupation, she and her comrades came across “a fragile tiny plant” in the prison’s courtyard and took turns to water it. Witnessing life “sprout from under the rock” assured them that they too shall overcome.

Such an understanding of the necessity for an all-encompassing resistance is the foundation of ‘Women from South Lebanon’ as well as ‘A Place of Rage’, thrusting the most intimate minutiae of our lives into the heartland of political struggle. Additionally, this fundamental principle might have granted ‘Women from South Lebanon’ its other, more popular English title – ‘Wild Flowers: Women of South Lebanon’ – which is closer to the original Arabic title زهرة القندول which refers to the Calicotome flower, colloquially known as the ‘thorny broom’,  one of the symbols of South Lebanon, representing both steadfastness and tenderness. This change in preposition, (‘Women from South Lebanon’ to ‘Women of South Lebanon’), is an epistemological assertion: the resistance of these women has been historically informed by a militant insistence to continue to live, labour, and love in their South. 

However, this militant insistence, insofar as it expresses certain ways of living and knowing, requires militant maintenance. In 2009, Caye Castagnetto and the late Marina Vishmidt represented Cinenova during an event at The Women’s Library in London as part of a symposium titled ‘Women and the Archive: A Partial Disclosure’, the transcript of which is available online. Towards the end of the  transcript is a list of questions, and what reads like the only tenet amongst a series of reflections: “Mobilise desire”[13]. The tethering of distribution and desire is further articulated in the Cinenova working group’s text from 2017, in which they state the following: ‘The work that we do operates across volunteer-run spaces, public arts spaces, self-organised programming, educational context, social, community, public and private, through circuits of desire’[14]. If militancy can be understood as the burgeoning capacity to collectively hold the line, then feminist practices of film distribution are certainly one domain from which to animate it. These circuits of desire are informed by a more capacious structure of feeling to which the notion of militancy continues to be significant as it inspires and instructs a future-oriented praxis, not only in terms of filmmaking but also, and more prominently, of worldmaking. As June Jordan eloquently puts it in ‘A Place of Rage’, “every sphere of your life, and certainly the sphere of your heart should not be something relegated to a peripheral issue. My heart is not peripheral to me.” Accordingly, from where will militancy emanate if not the sphere of the desiring heart?