Host Anna Smith will be joined by BBC Asian Network’s Ashanti Omkar and pop culture expert Dr Kirsty Fairclough of the University of Salford, and special guest Waad al-Kateab, director of For Sama, to review current releases and discuss classic films from a female perspective.
Ashanti will be previewing HOME’s Not Just Bollywood season, while the group will be paying tribute to the great Juliette Binoche by discussing some of her most entertaining and provocative work. As ever, the audience will be encouraged to contribute to the conversation – come ready to join the feminist fun!
Hear the Girls On Film podcast series on iTunes or SoundCloud.
More on Waad, Ashanti and Kirsty:
Waad al-Kateab
Emmy award winning filmmaker Waad al-Kateab (Channel 4 News) is the co-director and star of the award-winning new film For Sama, an intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war. A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her.
Ashanti Omkar
Ashanti Omkar presents her eponymous radio show on BBC Asian Network, while also serving as Indian film and Bollywood expert, for BBC West Midlands, and BBC London. Ashanti is a proud member of The UK Critics’ Circle, and is on the awards committee. Ashanti has written over 1000 pages, on the South Asian entertainment sphere, and her DesiHits SouthSide Show, was part of the early wave of popular podcasts on Apple iTunes, over a decade ago. She has worked with the Oscar nominated Aamir Khan Production company, BAFTA, double Oscar and double Grammy winner AR Rahman, and works closely with the London Indian Film Festival which is the UK and Europe’s largest festival of cinema from the Indian subcontinent.
Kirsty Fairclough
Dr Kirsty Fairclough is Associate Dean Research & Innovation at the University of Salford. A speaker, author and event curator, Kirsty works in the areas of women in pop culture, celebrity studies and popular music with an emphasis on Prince. She is Chair of Manchester Jazz Festival.
Kirsty has published widely on popular culture and is the co-editor of The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop (Routledge), The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment (Bloomsbury) and Music/Video: Forms, Aesthetics, Media. New York, (Bloomsbury) and author of the forthcoming Beyoncé: Celebrity Feminism and Popular Culture (I.B Tauris) and co-author of American Cinema: A Contemporary Introduction (Palgrave). Kirsty’s work has been published in Senses of Cinema, Feminist Media Studies, SERIES and Celebrity Studies journals and has been featured on BBC 4, BBC Radio Manchester, and in The Guardian and Creative Review amongst others.
She is the co-curator of Sound and Vision: Pop Stars on Film held recently at HOME.
