Seen and Heard Festival 2014

Overview

If you've so far not seen or heard Seen & Heard, make up for it in 2014, when the festival returns for a fifth outing. Celebrating the exciting work being done by women in film across directing, writing and producing, this festival-with-a-message believes that "films made by women are not just for women".

Across three Thursday nights at Marrickville's ever-cosy Red Rattler, you can check out shorts and documentaries ranging from the serious to the downright silly, with themes including disability, race relations, sex and self-discovery.

Alex Kelly's documentary Queen of the Desert looks like a must-see, following a truly unique youth worker called Starlady as she journeys to a remote Indigenous community in Central Australia. Leslie Tai's Grave Goods also looks interesting — a visual imagining of the life lived by objects left behind by her departed grandmother. There's also Jennifer Lee's documentary Feminist: Stories from Women's Liberation, winner of Best of the Fest at the Los Angeles Women's International Film Festival.

Seen & Heard is now in its fifth year and should be a good night for anyone interested in women's cinema, or cinema in general for that matter. It's $15 for one evening and $35 gets you a season pass to all three nights.

A festival like this is still vital in the film industry, where only one female director has ever won an Oscar for Best Direction or even a Palme d'Or. And as Cate Blanchett put it in her Oscar acceptance speech for Blue Jasmine, the industry boasts plenty of people "who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films with women at the centre are niche experiences. They are not. Audiences want to see them, and in fact, they earn money."

Want more new shorts and features from female filmmakers? Check out the World of Women (WOW) Film Festival based at the Dendy Circular Quay.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=d04_8xPiQFI