Kim Longinotto (born 1952) is a British documentary filmmaker, well known for making films that highlight the plight of female victims of oppression or discrimination.
Longinotto studied camera and directing at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, England, where she now tutors occasionally. Longinotto was born to an Italian father and a Welsh mother; her father was a photographer who later went bankrupt. At the age of 10 she was sent to a draconian all-girls boarding school, where she found it hard to make friends due to the mistress forbidding anyone to talk to her for a term after she became lost during a school trip.
After a period of homelessness, Longinotto went on to Essex University to study English and European literature and later followed friend and future filmmaker, Nick Broomfield to the National Film and Television School. While studying, she made a documentary about her boarding school that was shown at the London Film Festival, since when she has continued to be a prolific documentary filmmaker.
Longinotto is an observational filmmaker. Observational cinema, also known as direct cinema, free cinema or cinema verite, usually excludes certain documentary techniques such as advanced planning, scripting, staging, narration, lighting, re-enactment and interviewing.
Longinotto’s unobtrusiveness, which is an important part of observational documentary, gives the women on camera a certain voice and presence that may not have emerged with another documentary genre.
(from Women Make Movies http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/makers/fm44.shtml)
a. Watch these short films where Longinotto discusses her filmmaking style.
What are the main features of how she makes films?
b. Look at the opening five minutes of Longinotto’s film Divorce Iranian Style (1999) and clips from Rough Aunties (1998)
How far are her ideas about filmmaking reflected here?
SUMMARY
A British director who works in observational documentary
Her subject matter has a primary focus on women’s lives
She favours long takes and she tries to capture the extraordinary in the lives of the subjects that she observes
The stories that she brings to the screen are often uniquely personal, mainly focusing on society’s outsiders
Her films shot in a calm, unobtrusive style, often centre on victims of discrimination and oppression and tell the stories of strong female characters fighting for change and justice
She has worked in a number of different countries around the world for example Iran, Cameroon, Japan and the US
Her key films Dreamcatcher (2015), Rough Aunties (2008) and Divorce Iranian Style (1998) all expose the raw immediacy in her films
It could be argued that her perspective on the range of different cultures she encounters in her films gives a real sense of herself as an ‘outsider’ filmmaker
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