Women Filmmakers and the Welfare State Transnational Film Cultures During the Long 1970s in Canada and Sweden

Notes on the Contributors
Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: Women Filmmakers and the Welfare State
Maria Jansson, Mariah Larsson, Scott MacKenzie, and Anna Stenport

2. Canada and Sweden: Welfare States and Film Production
Maria Jansson, Mariah Larsson, Scott MacKenzie, and Anna Stenport

Part I: Art Cinema and the Woman Auteur

3. When Gender Talks: The Auteur Journey to Art Cinema Directing for Mireille Dansereau and Gunnel Lindblom
Maria Jansson and Anna Stenport

4. Love, Mai Zetterling: A Woman Auteur in a Canadian Context
Mariah Larsson

Part II: Constructing the Welfare State Child and Educational Media

5. The Filmmaker as Useful Social Animator: National and Transnational Perspectives on Stefania Börje and FilmCentrum around 1970
Lars Diurlin

6. Women in Swedish Children’s Television in the 1970s
Malena Janson and Anders Åberg

7. The Magic of Make Believe and Play in Mr. Dressup
Julia Brook and Scott MacKenzie

Part III: Geopolitics, Gender, and the Public Sphere

8. Geopolitics, the Welfare State, and Feminist Anti-War Documentary in the Nuclear Age
Scott MacKenzie and Anna Stenport

9. Loving and Not Loving Not a Love Story: Contexts of Reception in Canada and Sweden
Mariah Larsson and Scott MacKenzie

Part IV: Indigenous Presences and Absences

10. It’s a Long Way from Invisibility to Visual Sovereignty: The Absence of Sámi Women in Film During the 1970s
Ragnhild Nilsson

11. "It Was the Voice of a Nation": Alanis Obomsawin’s Documentary Activism in the 1970s
Joanna Hearne

Part V: Women’s Practice, Collectives, and Partnerships

12. Polyphony and Performativity in Québec’s Vidéo Femmes
Karine Bertrand and Claire Gray

13. Feministisch Filmkollektief Cinemien and the First International Feminist Film and Video Conference (1981): Feminist Film Activism, the Dutch Welfare State, and Global Networks
Gerdien Smit

14. Finding Zsóka Nestler: Archives, Databases, and Audiovisual Memory
Dagmar Brunow

15. Film as a Catalyst for Change: Christina Olofson on Documentary Filmmaking in the 1970s
Tove Thorslund

Part VI: Experimental Film

16. Feminist Bricoleurs: Collage and the Everyday in the Early Films of Joyce Wieland and Gunvor Nelson
Shana MacDonald

17. Kay Armatage Interviews Joyce Wieland (1971)
Interview by Kay Armatage

18. Barbara Hammer’s Audience Encounters in the Early 1980s: Lesbian Potentiality and Transnational Film Feminism
Ingrid Ryberg

Index

Biography

Anna Stenport is Professor of Communication Studies and Dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia, USA. Previously published books include Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere (ed., with Arne Lunde, 2019) and New Arctic Cinemas: Media Sovereignty and the Climate Crisis (with Scott MacKenzie, 2023).

Maria Jansson is Professor of Gender Studies at Örebro University, Sweden. She has published extensively on women’s conditions in the Swedish film sector. Recent publications include “Activism and gender equality policy in the Swedish film sector from the second wave to #metoo” (Women’s Studies International Forum, 2024).

Mariah Larsson is Professor of Film Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Publications include The Swedish Porn Scene: Exhibition Contexts, 8mm Pornography and the Sex Film (2017), A Cinema of Obsession: The Life and Work of Mai Zetterling (2020), and Handbook of Nordic Cinema (ed., with Gunnar Iversen, 2026).

Scott MacKenzie is Professor of Film and Media and Acting Vice-Dean, Faculty of Arts and Science, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. His most recent books include Mapping the Rockumentary: Images of Sound and Fury (ed., with Gunnar Iversen, 2021), and New Arctic Cinemas: Media Sovereignty and the Climate Crisis (with Anna Stenport, 2023).

This study provides a meticulous account of the conditions for women filmmakers in relation to cultural movements, politics, and policy during the long 1970s. The time frame for this volume is from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Written in close dialog with archival methodologies, the book foregrounds women’s intersectional agency as facilitators of film cultures, as filmmakers but also in terms of their films to present new images of society. The authors identify new avenues for understanding how women’s creative practice emerged, which intersects with areas of influence beyond humanistic scholarship, including public policy, education, data and archival management, and political studies. By moving beyond “identity politics” or “embodied experiences” which, for good reason, have been the focus of much of feminist film studies, the contributors’ to this volume foregrounds the rich artistic and socio-political contexts, examining not only the works made, but also the networks of production, distribution, and dissemination that developed during the period. Women Filmmakers and the Welfare State: Transnational Film Cultures during the Long 1970s in Canada, Sweden, and Beyond delivers more than expected. It has been some time since the field has seen a book on women filmmakers with so much original archival material, and no other book has given us the comparative perspective we find here.

Christoper Natzén, PhD. Research Officer, National Library of Sweden


Women Filmmakers and the Welfare State: Transnational Film Cultures in the Long 1970s in Canada, Sweden and Beyond provides you with a rich and diverse look into women’s film practice beyond the usual optics. By addressing the transnational connections between Canada and Sweden and film practices embedded in the various facets of the welfare state the collection of articles reveals both an intriguing film cultural undergrowth and opens up new perspectives and methods for further research.

John Sundholm, Professor, Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden.


A remarkable achievement in scholarly collaboration and critical insight, Women Filmmakers and the Welfare State: Transnational Film Cultures in the Long 1970s in Canada, Sweden and Beyond sheds new light on the complex intersections of film production, negotiated cultural support, and professional networks during the heyday of welfare state reforms in Canada and Sweden. The volume traces a comparative and multifaceted approach to woman film history, highlighting overlooked spheres of action and agency in the long 1970s, while also raising urgent concerns about the threats to archival collections and cultural life today.

Malin Wahlberg, Professor, Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. 


In times when public funding support to the arts are under attack, as a result of the welfare state being dismantled, this collection on women’s filmmaking and movements in Canada and Sweden during so-called long 1970s offers a much-needed reminder and urging. The many insightful essays – grasping both national and cross-national, organizational and individual examples – examine, compare, and explain the different, yet connected, state efforts that were made to support women’s film making, in the broadest sense, proving how such support led not only to the emergence of a number of prominent filmmakers, but also, to a widened, collaborative and inclusive film culture driven by women. In discussing the nationally specific as well as transnational mobility between the two countries, the essays help highlight the importance of the internationalist movement of 1970s feminist, queer, Indigenous, and post-colonial mobilizations, all while stressing how women’s film work has left few traces in physical and digital archives and in research – and how it is absolutely crucial to preserve their work and to write their histories.

Louise Wallenberg, Professor, Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden.


This important book interweaves 1970s feminist movements, government policies, and transnational women’s filmmaking practices while decentering the United States. It reveals the unique contributions of Canada and Sweden to feminist filmmaking, as well as the continuities, discontinuities, and surprising connections between the two welfare-state nations. The volume expands beyond production to questions of distribution, reception, and archival afterlives. Scholars of feminist film history, transnational feminism, and historians of the welfare state will find it a valuable resource.

Laura Horak, Professor of Film Studies, Carleton University, Canada. Author of Trans Cinema: Making Communities, Identities, and Worlds (2026)


Women Filmmakers and the Welfare State sets out clearly the cultural movements, politics and policy frameworks that shaped conditions for women filmmakers in Western Europe and North America during the 1970s. The comparative framework adopted sets out an exceptionally novel and generative way of thinking about how women in Canada and Sweden experienced public support for their heterogenous filmmaking and the affordances created by that support. This book offers an admirably broad range of practices and contexts through which to understand the exchanges and entanglements of filmmaking in places and periods that shaped international practice. Women Filmmakers and the Welfare State is an invaluable text for anyone working in the fields of cultural and gender politics, archival practices, comparative studies, access and women’s film history.

Anne O’Brien, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Maynooth University, Ireland. Author of Women, Inequality and Media Work (2019)