Alexis Krasilovsky – Women Behind the Camera #OstravaKameraOko

Alexis Krasilovsky – filmmaker – Women Behind the Camera

FRED’s Matt Micucci meets filmmaker Alexis Krasilovsky, whose documentary WOMEN BEHIND THE CAMERA was screened at the 7th edition of Ostrava Kamera Oko.

While the film was shot in 2007, it is worryingly and undoubtedly relevant to this day. And because it is, the issue of the difficulties being female and working as a cinematographer was also further explored in a book named SHOOTING WOMEN, and the second edition of the book will be released in a month’s time.

Through our discussion about the film WOMEN BEHIND THE CAMERA, we discuss with the filmmaker the feminist themes and issues dealt within it, and briefly try to understand why even to this day, the film industry is dominated by men – and how absurd this is! But it is a hopeful chat. As Alexis says, things are slowly but surely moving – and adds that this is not only a female issue.

Besides that, we discuss her future project LET THEM EAT CAKE, which, much like “Women Behind the Camera”, it is a global documentary, meaning that it tells stories of people from all over the world, collectively but representing something universal.

For more information, click here to visit the official website of Women Behind the Camera.

For more more information, click here to visit the official website of Let Them Eat Cake.

WOMEN BEHIND THE CAMERA: This global documentary, based on Alexis Krasilovsky’s book of the same name, explores the lives of camerawomen in Hollywood and Bollywood, Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Senegal, the U.S. and other countries in a way never seen before.

American camerawomen include top directors of photography Ellen Kuras, ASC (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), Sandi Sissel, ASC (“Salaam Bombay!”) and pioneers like African-American camerawoman Jessie Maple Patton—who had to sue the union and television networks to get a job. For the past six years, the filmmakers have followed the lives of over fifty camerawomen, from video journalists risking their lives in war zones, to feature DP’s, shooting buddies-with-guns escaping in slow motion from total destruction on commercial sets.

From secret films by camerawomen of the Taliban beating Afghani women, to historic footage by China’s first camerawomen of Mao’s travels through the Chinese countryside. From the narrative of a Russian filmmaker who filmed the fall of the Soviet Union, whose choice of career is told as a love story, to rural India, where subsistence-level women are taught camerawork as a means of empowerment, to the glowing young Senegalese camerawoman willing to climb onto a man’s shoulders— literally—to get her subject, Professor Krasilovsky shows us a world of beauty, courage and technical skill.