We're bringing into focus a wide range of women amateur filmmakers whose creative work has been overlooked and unacknowledged in the archives.
Working closely with two partner archives, the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA) and the Irish Film Archive (IFA), we have conducted new research into existing collections of largely unknown women amateur filmmakers.
Our work
By identifying significant gaps in knowledge at the level of cataloguing, accession records, historical research, and metadata – and by adopting feminist methodologies that allow us to challenge existing practices – we have developed a toolkit that will allow any archive with a moving image collection to create more effective, useful and accessible records about women filmmakers.
The Filmmakers
As part of this work, we have produced a set of biographies that highlight some of these amazing creative women. As a small step to making such women’s filmmaking more broadly available, below you will find small selection of women amateur filmmakers from across the UK and Ireland collections.
Sarah Daly grew up a film fan, enjoying watching old movies on television, and later developed an interest in photography, which then became her career aspiration. Not in possession of an Art Foundation qualification (she had originally intended to study drama instead) and so unable to go straight onto her desired programme of study in her late teens, instead she developed her own portfolio of photographic work, benefitting greatly from the mentorship of family friend, Irish Examiner photo-journalist Denis Minihane, as well as getting a job on her local newspaper in her home town of Cheltenham which allowed her to develop her skills. On the basis of the portfolio she built, she was offered places on multiple photography degrees but chose to study Reportage Photography at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham, from 1983-86. It was during her degree that she first became involved in filmmaking.
Because of her specialism in photography, Sarah Daly was introduced by a friend to amateur filmmaker Steve Symes when she was back home in Cheltenham for the Christmas vacation, with the idea that she might be able to provide some assistance with photography and lighting on the latest production from Symes’s filmmaking group, the Abbey Film Unit. But actually what Sarah Daly ended up contributing to the unit would develop into something much more focussed on storytelling, scriptwriting and direction, areas that were arguably in greater need of support. The collaboration was personal as well as creative, as Daly outlined in a later interview: ‘So when I came along, we got on like a house on fire and actually within a few weeks ended up going out together and subsequently got married.’ (Daly 2023)
Working in the Abbey Film Unit, Sarah Daly wrote and directed the rom-com about joggers, Racing Hearts (1985), a film about the blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy in children’s wargames, Reign of the Tigers (1985), and a gentle comedy about educational family outings to ancient monuments, There is a Green Hill (1986). This latter film earned Sarah a place among the finalists of the BBC Radio Times Film and Video Awards for young movie-makers under 25, where the head judge Alan Parker praised its for its poignant humour, comparing it to the work of the celebrated television dramatist Jack Rosenthal.
Screen still from Reign of the Tigers (1985) courtesy of Sarah Daly and East Anglian Film Archive.
The Abbey Film Unit films that Sarah Daly wrote and directed – although it was always a collective effort – earned the group numerous amateur film awards, and they swept the board in the 1985 IAC awards for their films Racing Hearts and Reign of the Tigers, with Daly recalling that the unit ‘won something like eleven out of the fifteen available awards, which was fantastic.’ They were all in their early to mid twenties and Daly recalled their ‘novelty factor’ as the ‘new kids on the block’ when ‘all the other amateur film makers were probably in their fifties and sixties. It was a very, very different cohort and it was all male dominated […] I was pretty much one of the only women in the room. There were maybe some partners coming along, but certainly I can't remember seeing any other women who were involved in filmmaking’ (Daly 2023). She felt her personal appearance as ‘an arty student, dressed in black a lot of the time’ made her extra conspicuous. However, the amateur film culture of the period still found ways to make sense of the young filmmaker within its existing (rather patronising) frames of reference, with the magazine Movie Maker making her their ‘pin-up of the month’ and describing her as ‘an erudite as well as attractive young lady’ (anon 1984).
The unit’s activities were impacted by Steve Symes getting a trainee camera operator job with Central Television in the mid-1980s, meaning he had less time for his amateur filmmaking work, while Sarah Daly’s professional ventures – starting a marketing consultancy company after she graduated as well as undertaking property renovation – had a similar impact, as did the everyday demands of home and family; ‘Life got in the way’, as Daly herself summarised their situation (Daly 2023). The unit collaborated on a further film production, The Sandcastle, shot on location at Sandy Bay, Devon, which won an IAC Gold Seal in 1994, but Daly’s filmmaking and photographic expertise would end up being channelled much more into her professional work, doing photoshoots and promotional videos for corporate clients, some of which won her company international awards. In her current work as a champion and strategist for sustainability, she recognises the importance of narrative and imagery in effecting cultural change, and still draws upon the skills she developed as a photographer and filmmaker.
Selected filmography
Racing Hearts (1985) https://eafa.org.uk/work/?id=1026093
Reign of the Tigers (1985) https://eafa.org.uk/work/?id=1026106
There is a Green Hill (1986)
The Sandcastle (1994)
Bibliography
Anon, ‘Pin-up of the Month’, Movie Maker, July 1984,
Anon, 'The Abbey Road to Success', Amateur Film Maker, December 1984, pp. 14-17.
Anon, 'The Young Ones: Sarah Daly', Making Better Movies, May 1985, p. 153.
Interview with Sarah Daly, conducted via Zoom, with Melanie Williams, 6 January 2023.
Profile image from Amateur Movie Maker magazine, July 1984, p.62.
Our partners
This work comes from a joint UK-Ireland collaboration between the University of East Anglia, Maynooth University, and the University of Sussex; funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Irish Research Council (IRC), as part of the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities scheme.
