Sophie Mayer

Yes, it's Women's History Month (the long tail attached to International Women's Day), an opportunity for magazines and festivals to draw attention to women artists and visionaries -- and to write about them. Mystic, composer, teacher and poet Hildegard von Bingen appears courtesy of Margarethe von Trotta, doyenne of the New German Cinema whose filmmaking spans five decades. You can catch up with her films about Hildegard and Rosa Luxemburg at the Bird's Eye View festival, or virtually via my von Trotta survey for Sight & Sound. Also at BEV, Imogen Heap, Micachu, Tara Jane Busch and Seaming all made amazing music for silent shorts by female film pioneers, and I'll be writing about that for Sound and Music's excellent Sound on Film project (to whcih I contributed a piece on feeling film sound). If you like the sound of that, look out for The Lighthouse by Maria Saakyan, coming soon on DVD from the indefatigable Second Run. I've been obsessed by this mysterious, funny, melancholy, lovely Armenian film since I saw it in 2007, and I was honoured that Second Run asked me to contribute an essay to the DVD booklet, which thinks about women and light and houses.