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Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi and Shilyh J. Warren eds., "Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)
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Shailey Warren
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hi, welcome to my podcast channel. I'm so happy to be here again in conversation with another film studies scholar and her latest book. Today's new book is Women and Global Practices and perspectives in the 21st century, edited by Najmeh Muradian Razi and Shailee Warren. Women and Global Documentary is such a compelling and insightful work in the field of documentary studies. From the range of topics to the collaborators, the book truly connects theory and praxis of documentary studies and feminist filmmaking. We have critical discussions on feminist world building by scholars like Patricia White and Emal Shafiq, discussions on re examining the public private discourse in feminism through documentary by scholars such as Lorena Cervera and Wake Nakane, a deep focus on documentary activism by Najmi Mouradian, Rizi Zaira Zarza and Kim Mundro, and even a fascinating conversation on feminism as a documentary method by filmmakers such as Hana Jayanti, Noorab, Shan Mirza, Rosa Johan, Addo Irene Lustig, and Andrea Luca Zimmerman. All the chapters of this collection foreground important topics in documentary studies, women's authorship, documentary representation, and political subjectivity. To talk to us more about this book, we have one of the editors, Shailey Warren, with us. Shilee Warren is the Associate professor of Visual and Performing Arts and the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies in the Harry W. Pash Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her research and publications focus primarily on documentary film history and theory, and feminist studies. Her first book, Subject to Reality, Women and Documentary, was published by University of Illinois Press in 2019, which tells the story of women documentary filmmakers from two key periods, the 1920s and 30s and the 1970s. She has also written about contemporary feminist documentaries, especially films that advocate for justice for marginalized people or raise awareness about urgent political crises such as sexual harassment and violence, environmental demise, and reproductive rights. Welcome, Shailey. Really thrilled to have you here. Tell us more about the journey of this book. What led to this much needed global intervention in documentary studies?
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Shailey Warren
Well, thank you again for having me, Aria. It's a real pleasure to be here with you and thanks for selecting this book for the podcast. It's great to reach new audiences through the podcast, so thank you for what you do. I really want to credit Najma here, my collaborator, Najma Moradi Enrizi, who first approached me with the idea to do this collection. I think as an Iranian scholar in the U.S. najma was very attuned and sensitive to the ways that film studies as a whole, and documentary studies in her case in particular, is so consistently focused on the global North. And despite the fact that I think many of us make attempts to think about and with other forms of cinema and filmmakers, the lion's share of the attention, as we know, remains either on the Global north itself or on scholars from the Global north writing about the global South. So she came to me and said, you know, I really feel like something's missing. I really feel like the field is in desperate need of a book that stretches the boundaries, you know, geographical and theoretical, into other areas. And she said, I know, even to me, she said, I know most of your work is focused on the US But I really would love to work with you on expanding that purview for both of us and for the field as a whole. So all the credit goes to Najma for the idea for the book, and I'm really grateful that she pulled me in. I had long wanted to move in this direction, but because of other things happening in my career, didn't quite have the bandwidth. And collaborating with her was really the perfect way to do that. I'm grateful for her inspiration and all the work that she put into it. And I know she wasn't able to be with us today, but she's here in spirit. So the way we went about this may be slightly different from the way other collections go in that we did not do a wide open call for papers. And partly that was because we really wanted to curate particular conversations with scholars that we knew that were working on uncertain geographical areas. So you and I, as, I think, thinkers and global cinema and world cinema, and as educators in that space, know that coverage is like an impossible ideal. One can never do it all, and one can never actually even be comprehensive. Frankly, right there, we're always going to leave so much out. So in order to handle that, I think, complication, I mean, this, this challenge that we all face in the field of world cinema, we thought, let's make sure that we, you know, as many diverse regions of the world as possible, and we'll approach scholars that we know work in those areas. And so that's what we did. So we approached scholars based on existing work, and they sometimes made recommendations or gave us leads to other scholars. The ones that said yes, the ones that said no sometimes pointed us in other directions as well. And we had some goals in mind. So we wanted to make sure we were geographically diverse. We wanted to make sure that we had a range of voices from immersion emergent new scholars to established and recognized scholars in the field. We wanted to make sure that we had practitioners as well as educators and thinkers of various sites. So we were going for many goals. We had many goals in mind when we reached out to authors, most of whom, while I was reading the book.
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Interviewer
I was also pleasantly surprised by reading not just works by non scholars like Patricia White, but also filmmakers like Hannah Jaindi Noor of Shanmirza. And I think that that diversifies the scholarly conversation too, and brings in a perspective that most collections might miss. And it also acts as like a bridge between, you know, academia and praxis, which we always talk about. So what I noticed in the introduction by you and Najmi is that there is a sense of urgency. The collection channels the increasingly urgent demand for feminist documentary filmmaking from around the globe. And you also talk about the urgent need to reevaluate the significance of feminist documentary practices. So could you elaborate on that urgency and what this collection particularly does towards that urgency that you have identified?
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Shailey Warren
Well, we name a couple of things in the book, and we were putting this book together maybe a year and a half ago, so in 2024. And at that time, we were already feeling pressure here in General, I think 21st century pressures, we might say, the ones that many of us have noticed, whether that's globalization, digital expansion, war, displacement, the climate crisis, and more. Right. So this is a sort of a known, let's say, landscape of crises and urgencies. I think for us in particular, it felt like a good time to revisit the relationship between documentary filmmaking and feminist activism. And so, in my own words, I think what I would say is that I wonder if you would agree with me, Aria, but feminist activism, feminist documentary, both feel like terms that no longer have as concrete a center. You know, my work on the 1970s, it was very easy to. Well, easy is not the right word, but it felt very doable to gather, like, an archive of films and call them feminist documentaries. In the 1970s, it felt very doable and it felt very true. I feel that that's really hard today. It's really hard for us to agree on a definition of feminism. It's really hard for us to agree on the boundaries of something called feminist documentary. And yet documentary has been such a vital site for feminist activism. We know this. We know this across the globe, when feminist issues, like, demand attention, they often, you know, take life and breath in feminist documentary as a way to reach broader audiences. So considering those things, it felt urgent, because it felt urgent to both state that there are. Right. Like, this continues to be a practice of feminist filmmakers. Right. That. That women filmmakers, when they take up cameras and work on feminist issues, they make feminist documentaries. It felt urgent to say that that that's a continu. And that's like. Continues to be a key way that politics make it out into the public and demand attention from the public. And it also felt like we were, I mean, so much, you know, even more so now, but we were feeling so much backlash, pressure on feminism. Right. There are so many ways in which, I think post MeToo, feminism is continually asked to defend itself and to reassert its priorities to remind us why it should exist at all. You know, it felt urgent to say feminism continues to matter and that documentary really matters to feminism. Yeah.
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Interviewer
I think that also is reflected in the title Women and Global Documentary. Right. So there is a very explicit pull towards the transnational nature of documentaries and also feminist activism.
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Shailey Warren
So.
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Interviewer
And this focus on film from Global South. So where is the convergence or what are these overlapping Relations between documentary filmmaking, feminist activism, Film from the Global south, and that special focus you give to Film from the Global South.
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Shailey Warren
One of the most enduring challenges for feminism, I would say, is matters of solidarity and matters of collectivity and collaboration, not just across social differences within countries, but across the globe as well. And I think, you know, what? We. We wanted to just, you know, sort of pressure the node, let's say, of thinking. We wanted to apply pressure there and to advance the conversation there. We wanted to make the book, I think, part of the network of transnational feminist activism that we see in the world of cinema. So I think, and, you know, we've thought this together, right? Is that how do films travel the globe? How do they reach us? Who do they reach? Which films make it out into those spaces? And if that's true at the level of cinema, right, that film has this power to reach beyond its own, let's say, home and into someone else's. I think we wanted the book to kind of reflect that circulation, let's say, like, that mode of circulation, so that these ideas would also circulate in various directions of the global. Well, from. Not just from, right? But like, in relationship with, let's say, the poles. I think I hesitate because I say I'm not sure how effective we were, to be quite honest. This is a challenging task for so many reasons. And I think many scholars in the Global north maybe share this challenge, different, differently from scholars in the Global South. That is to say, that we have in the Global North, I think, already hegemony over the conversation, right? Because of the publishing outlets, because of the universities that we work at, because of the way that English is, you know, dominant language of knowledge production around the world. What would it really mean to create a book that focused on the Global South? I mean, it would come more from the Global south, obviously, right? Not only, like, work focused on the global south, but scholars working in the Global south and their own languages, you know, et cetera. We didn't achieve that in this book. But what was, I think, brilliant and helpful for me about doing this book is to, you know, is to kind of confront that challenge and then to realize after the book is realized and you think you've done something right, like you think you've made a collection that focuses more broadly on, you know, on overshadowed sites and films and filmmakers around the globe, you realize, like, wow, you have really only just touched the surface. Which is to say that this is hopefully a book that will inspire others maybe to even go beyond and to reach further and to create, I think even more explosive connections or connections that even more powerfully explode. Kind of the habits that we have in the global North, I think. When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets. Mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.
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Shailey Warren
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Interviewer
Yeah, and it also expands feminist media studies in a way. And even though you say this, it's only touching the surface, but it's to even bring the film from Global south to this, you know, like you said, it is overshadowed by all the works in the Global North. So that tiny entry itself, I mean, it might be a small step, but it feels big. Right, and how do you do this? Can you give us like a layout of the book with its. There are four wonderful sections. And what logic guided these sections and what can we find in those sections?
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Shailey Warren
Okay, well, one of the, I think one of the collaborative projects that was happening at the same time as our book was happening was the collection called Feminist World Making and the Moving Image by Erika Balsam and Hilla Peleg. Now, this is another wonderful, amazing global book. And it also had an exhibition that took place in Berlin. And the reason I mention it is because, you know, I was lucky enough to go to this exhibition in Berlin and just what I saw there blew my mind. And really, you know, the collection of work that was brought into the space that they created. But in Particular their focus on this word, world making. Feminist world making. And so that word really sat with me and was one of the organizing principles for the book in terms of thinking about, like, how do you build worlds, right? What are worlds built from? And so partly, I think that kind of threads through all of these sections, but is most apparent in the first one. So documentary initiatives as feminist world making. Sorry, documentary initiatives as feminist world building. So here we're actually looking at institutions, both formal and informal, that creates pathways for filmmakers to reach audiences. And there's a wide. I mean, there's only three chapters in this section, but we do everything from Caravan, which is an informal network of Arab or Arabic speaking filmmakers in the Middle east, to Women make movies, right? Maybe one of the most powerful engines in the global North. So in that section we really. And then in East Africa, Docubox as well. So here we try to hit the range, right? So like informal, formal in the global south and formal in. In the global north as well. So how are these sort of institutional sites promoting this work and creating spaces for women filmmakers? In the second section, I think still continuing the theme of world building or world making, here we explore kind of the classic feminist relationship between the personal and the political. So these are films that are about families, familial space, or about intimate violence, in the case of my chapter with Christine Varus. So here, thinking about that relationship between the individual and the collective, in the third section, we look more specifically at activism. So different forms of feminist activism, which include here ecofeminism in Iranian documentaries, capitalist resistance in Puerto Rico, in Australia, Kim and Row writes about the work that happens between different forms of art as a form of documentary activism. In this case, between theater and documentary filmmaking as well. And in the fourth section here, we're taking up the question of voice. Voice, of course, is so key to feminist activism because what we're always clamoring for is of course the right to say truth, you know, to speak truths and to be heard. And here there's a range of work, maybe most significantly, two essays that are conversations between filmmakers themselves in the final section, and then indigenous filmmaking, as well as kind of a new way to think about connection and conversation. So I think what I could say is that the sections all raise and explore familiar sites of feminist activism, the personal question of voice, questions of solidarity, institutions and connection. But hopefully do so in new ways by bringing new voices, new conversations, new examples, new films, and new sites of inquiry into the conversation.
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Interviewer
Thank you for really telling us about the crux of all These sections that it was really helpful. So coming to your chapter that you have written with Christine Verris, Feminist Animated Documentary Ways of Confronting Violence Against Women. And this chapter was bought out of film festival that was held in UT Dallas, which I also attended. So you highlight the significance of animation to foreground non fictional issues relevant to global feminisms. So here you're bringing a connection between feminism, animation and documentary. So can you tell us more about these connections and how is animation as a form used to foreground what you call as non fictional issues?
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Shailey Warren
So this chapter, written with my colleague Christine Varus, who organized the original screening of these films, was an opportunity for us to think together, from my perspective in documentary and hers in animation, about this really obvious connection that has received so little attention from scholars. So animation has. So animated documentaries have received, you know, some attention from documentary scholars. I would argue that animation as a form of documentary filmmaking has received a little bit less attention from, or I would have argued, let's say before I started this chapter working with her, that it has received a little bit less attention from animation scholars. It turns out, right, that both sides, both groups, let's say, were thinking about these connections, but in very different ways and in separate ways. And so our goal here was to bring them together. And of course, as two scholars interested in, you know, this particular issue that is violence against women and global activism, we wanted to assert basically a new, what felt like a new concept which is feminist animated documentary. It feels funny to kind of try to come up with new terms for something that feels so obvious. And on the other hand, it just didn't exist in the literature. And so it was really important for us to say, like it is a particular kind of thing. So that when animation and documentary come together often, you know, when women animators and women artists make these sorts of films, they tend to make them about issues of feminist significance around the globe. And in this case, we were looking at films primarily about violence against women and responses to that. So part of our goal was to say, like, something's happening here, right? Like there's a group of films that all are moving in the same direction and they don't quite have a name and they don't. They haven't really been looked at together in this way in documentary studies. It is, I think, a truism at this point to say that documentary tends to, sorry, animation tends to be a way to explore basically what's not profilmacable, right? So like what can never take place in front of the camera either because it's happened in the past and we don't have access to it anymore, or because it's the realm of dream, fantasy, memory, et cetera. What happens when you take that truism and then you apply it to something like survivor stories? What, I guess, forms of healing, we might say, are possible there? What forms of awareness are possible? What might that actually do for an agenda focused on justice for women who have suffered violence in this way or who may in the future? So that was the question that we were really dealing with there. And I think we found it to be. I think one surprising thing that came out of this chapter for me was because we did interviews with all of the animators and filmmakers. Our method was also collaborative in that sense, is that we wanted to hear from them why they chose this form, why they chose these particular forms of this form, whether it was hand drawn animation or otherwise. And what had been their experience in taking these films out into the world through festivals and otherwise. Like, what kinds of impact did they feel their films were having? And many of them mentioned, I think, two things. One is that the collaboration itself, so the work that happened, like, among the crew, which tended to be groups of women, was already kind of a site of solidarity and activism, right? Women coming together to apply pressure and force awareness on these issues was. Was itself kind of like a site of transnational feminist solidarity. And the other thing is that, like, taking these films out in the world and hearing responses from audiences really indicated to them that seeing films can change minds, right? And can change hearts and can really move people into new directions. And each of them had a story to share about that being true. So for someone like me who studied feminist documentary for a really long time, and. And we're always coming up with what I would say, sort of slightly vague justifications for why we know it works, right? Like, we can't tell you that this X specific law changed or this, like, Y person was convicted very often. Sometimes we can, but not very often. But we continue to insist that feminist documentary is like a crucial form of activism and makes change in the world. And what I loved working on this chapter was that when you actually just talk to the filmmakers and hear, like, how they see that change happening, you get kind of new insights, you know, maybe not empirical studies and maybe not, like, convincing theories, let's say, but new information to bring to the conversation about the kinds of impacts that this documentary can have.
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Interviewer
Just curious about the different forms of animation that you have covered. So was there any link between the kind of animation form that they used and the impact it had or the topic that these documentaries talked about.
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Shailey Warren
I think that's a great question. These are very different films. Each of them uses its own style of animation. In the case of Carne, for example, the film by Camila Cutra from Brazil, several forms of animation within. It's tempting to say that the more tactile the forms of animation are, the more that they're produced materially and in space and with other people, the more that they facilitate kind of connection and conversation among the makers, and the more that. That being in time with the material kind of impacts the filmmaker's own sense of the making and the issue. Right. So that's one aspect. I think the other aspect might be the use of interviews. Not all of these films include interviews, but most of them do. And so in that work too, I think having voices of surviv or people who have experienced violence in some way, whether it's recreated or whether it's performed, when there's a source, like what I would call a documentary source, I think that also has an impact not only on the filmmaker, but on the viewers as well. And then I think what we wanted to foreground, too, is just the diversity of approaches for what we might call documentary, feminist, animated, documentary. So while some of these, the ones I've mentioned, for example, you know, handmade or hand processed or materially constructed, some of them are like that and some are completely performative and involve actors and, you know, sort of script. That range was also important for us to foreground. Right. We didn't want to create a limited category. We really wanted an expansive one that could be account that could include really experimental, performative works as well as maybe more familiar voiceover or interview or. Yeah, more connected to the real, let's say, as well.
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Interviewer
Clearly, the book is extremely useful for scholars of documentary studies. But who are the other audiences of the book and how can we place this among other disciplines?
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Shailey Warren
Well, I think it's primarily a book written, I would say, either for feminist scholars interested in different forms of activism, matters of transnational solidarity, and anyone curious about the kinds of issues women are facing around the globe and how they're resisting, fighting back, surviving them. So certainly I would say, you know, feminist audiences write large documentary and film scholars in particular, because we are trying to advance conversations in those fields. For sure. I think, honestly, anyone interested in the question of, like, if gender matters. And I'm going to say this particularly in terms of the artist. Right. So whether I think you're in literature or in philosophy, or in art history or in film studies or beyond. I think we are all called to account for the question of, like, does it matter who the maker is? Right. You know, it doesn't matter if it's a female auteur or just an auteur. Does. Do we need to say woman filmmaker or can we just say filmmaker? I don't think we've ever satisfyingly answered this question, but I know it continues to matter. I continue to care. I continue to care about work that's made by women. I want to know what kind of work women are making. I want to know what kind of work women are watching, and I want to know in particular, when women make work that's relevant to what I would call feminist struggles and feminist activism. So I think anyone who is curious about the question, you know, does it matter who the maker is? Like, what ways it matters? I think could find some answers in this book as well. Beyond that, of course, filmmakers, I think, filmmakers themselves and artists, filmmakers who are also interested in pursuing these kinds of films or making these kinds of films and want to know about the larger archive. Any student interested in just knowing what, you know, a wider range of films that maybe that were being taught in our seminars or reading in some of our anthologies, I think would be interested in that. This book, too, and I hope people I don't even know, maybe your students are. Yeah, yeah.
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Interviewer
Well, I. I am definitely using it for my course on transnational women directors, so. Well, I know where to buy this book, but could you tell us where we can find this book?
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Shailey Warren
Oh, I think it's widely available. I'm happy to say that I think it's also quite affordable. Thank goodness, because we had a paperback run of the book. Thank you very much to Bloomsbury. So you can buy it on the Bloomsbury website for sure. And I think hopefully it's affordable to you. And I hope you'll let your readers know if anybody's interested in a particular chapter or is listening from the Global south and doesn't have institutional access to this kind of purchase, that they should contact us directly. And we'd be happy to share our work.
- [33:47]
Interviewer
Thank you so much. It was really great talking to you about women and global documentary practices and perspectives in the 21st century. And thank you for. For joining us.
- [33:59]
Shailey Warren
Thank you so much for inviting us to the conversation and for sharing news about this book more broadly.
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