Valuing the labor of women amateur filmmakers and the archivists who preserve their works

This chapter introduces the collaborative Women in Focus project, involving archivists, historians and feminist scholars committed to improving the visibility of women’s amateur filmmaking in film archives. The project examined how women’s amateur films make their way into archives and are represented in archival catalogues and records. With attention to the undervalued labor of women amateur filmmakers and archivists, the chapter focuses on how feminist interventions into film archiving must be cognizant of both. It details the production of an archival toolkit and the collaborative work with archives in designing and implementing it.