Women's marginalization in the British feature film industry is well documented: gender discrimination, and sometimes overt segregation, shut most women out of senior creative roles after the introduction of sound. What has received less critical attention is their participation in nonfiction filmmaking, which offered women greater employment opportunities, especially in the decades after World War II as Britain rebuilt its economy. This article provides the first historical mapping of women's involvement in sponsored nonfiction filmmaking in Britain in the period between 1945 and 1970, using newly available statistical data from Britain's film trade union, the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT). It also draws on oral histories, extant films, and specialist trade publications to outline two case studies, one featuring three editors, and the other a director (Sarah Erulkar) who between them produced, directed and edited more than two hundred shorts on topics ranging from mineshaft sinking to French cookery. It argues that evidence of women's creative agency in this sector offers new ways of thinking about film history.

This essay offers a feminist reading of the work of Italian film director Cecilia Mangini. Drawing on an archaeological approach, it focuses on Mangini's experience as a woman in Italian cinema and her contribution to the realization of three movies— To Arms! We're Fascists! (codirected with Lino Del Fra and Lino Micciché, 1961–62), Stalin (directed with Lino Del Fra and Franco Fortini, 1962–63), and Being Women (1963–65)—all clear examples of the counterhegemonic cinema that Mangini developed in the fissures of mainstream, male-dominated practices. In her view, nonfiction film is a tool for cultural and political struggle, and it must affect the present in order to provide democratic access to knowledge. Following the Gramscian notion of the organic intellectual, Mangini has built a specific aesthetic and a personal approach to film direction, which aims to reach the broadest audience possible and, at the same time, to develop a coherent feminist militant discourse.

This short essay provides an overview of the career of Lee Dick, a female nonfiction film director and producer in the late 1930s and '40s. With a body of work that traverses documentary, industrial, and amateur production, Dick challenges perceived divisions between often overlapping spheres of nonfiction filmmaking and invokes tensions between personal and institutional authorship within a sponsored, and deeply collaborative, media context. Her largely unexamined career is a window into gendered labor and mid-twentieth-century media production.