Sophie Mayer

ouroboros review, edited by the lovely Jo Hemmant, launch their fourth issue today! You can read it online here or purchase a print-on-demand paper copy in their bookstore. I have four poems in the magazine, including one on the back cover, which is inspired by Sally Potter's The Man Who Cried.

'Tis the season, apparently: in the next fortnight, I'm reading at two launches for excellent magazines: Artesian: The WATER Issue, Weds Nov 11, Horse Hospital, 7pm, and Horizon Review 3 (as part of Ride the Word XVIII), Weds Nov 18, Yumchaa Soho, 7pm. If you're in London, come along! Wherever you are in the world, you can listen online to Nikk Quentin Woolf's Arts Show on Xstream East (Tuesday Nov 10, 3-4 pm), and both live and in the PennSound archive to Leonard Schartz's Cross-Cultural Poetics show on KAOS-FM, date tba. Woohoo!

Also: Michelle McGrane, a wonderful poet, included two poems from Her Various Scalpels on her lovely peony moon blog!

The BFI's first ever retrospective of a British woman director's work starts on 2nd December and runs throughout the month. Take a loved one (or first date?) to see the studio run of a beautiful new print of Orlando or let a post-Xmas screening of YES fill your heart with peace and goodwill to all. As co-curator, I'm inordinately proud of this fantastic season -- and also very proud to be introducing it in a "beginner's guide" on Friday Dec 4th, in collaboration with Club des Femmes, for Thriller and Potter's early shorts, some of which have not been seen since the 1970s! There's also events with Tilda Swinton and Julie Christie, so book early and I'll see you on the South Bank to reprise the dance from The London Story!

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2009 has been pretty special and it's not over yet: hot off the fine presses of Wayne State University Press comes my third book of the year, There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond. In the spirit of feminist art, this book is a collective effort: specifically, an editorial collaboration with with my friend and colleague Corinn Columpar from the University of Toronto Cinema Studies department, and with contributions from an amazing range of writers, including filmmaker Michelle Citron on digital filmmaking and Kay Armatage on programming women's cinema, and interviews with filmmakers Kim Longinotto and Samira Makhmalbaf -- seen in our cover image, directing At Five in the Afternoon in Afghanistan.

A preview of all the female-helmed films at the 2009 London Film Festival for Sight & Sound and a review of lesbian shorts DVD Here Come the Girls (order from Peccadillo Pictures) for Chroma. Both blog posts include great stills of hot women!

I've got two essays -- on Salt's Earthworks series and Ruth Padel's Darwin: A Life in Poems -- and a sexy sequence of three sci-fi prose poems in issue three of the magnificent Horizon Review, which ushers in October splendidly by almost capping the tally of four pieces in October's Sight and Sound (two reviews, and an interview with Agnès Varda split into two sections... S&S are a bit rubbish at putting their material online, so I can only link to the Birdwatchers review). Things really seem to be kicking off with the writing (although I've probably jinxed matters by stating the good news in public) (and hopefully unjinxed them by making the jinx explicit)! On the less good side, this means I have five deadlines to produce ten thousand words by the end of the month.

You can hear Sally Potter in discussion (with yours truly) at Cinéphilia West about her career, her new film RAGE, working with Jude Law and how she gets through doubt and despair on the Electric Sheep podcast. If you like what you hear, there are more gems of wisdom from Potter in The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love. Cinéphilia West is a truly amazing bookshop-café with an atmospheric event space: to find out about upcoming events, and to become a member, head over to the Cinéphilia website.

... in two very different settings: Keats House and the Curzon Renoir (although Jane Campion's forthcoming Bright Star connects the two -- check out the film's incredible website). I'm all about the connections between poetry and film so it feels fantastic to be reading...

• at a screening of Ben Crowe's Je Suis Ici -- and the world premiere of Crowe's latest film, Bound -- at the Curzon Renoir on Tuesday 6th October as part of the excellent PoetryFilm series, London's only dedicated film/poetry night.
• and at the launch of Brittle Star 24 on Wednesday 7th October, in the hauntingly beautiful surrounds of Keats House, along with a group of excellent writers.

Coming up on November 11th, I'll be reading at the launch event for the second issue of Artesian, an ambitious visual and literary culture journal whose first issue included articles by Anne Michaels and Don Delillo. More details to follow...

RAGE premieres this week and (I'm not ashamed to say) I've bought a dress to attend my first-ever film premiere. Find out more about where you can join in with the live interactive screening and Q&A, and read more about the film in my interview with Sally Potter for Bird's Eye View. Read Sally's account of the "wild night" at BFISouthbank here and some of the myriad worldwide reactions to the film, its innovative release strategy and NY and London launches in the articles and blogs gathered here.

Hear Britain's most independent director on her career and new film RAGE (premiering on Thursday 24 September in cinemas across the UK & Ireland with a live Q&A [watch online], available on limited edition DVD now, and direct to your mobile phone from Monday 21 September via Babelgum).

Sunday 27 September 2009

7pm :: limited space::come early

Cinéphilia West, 171 Westbourne Grove, London::map

info [at] cinephilia [dot] co [dot] uk