This August, Aya Films will launch pioneering new platform – Curate-It – in Edinburgh.

As part of this year’s edition, Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) and Curate-It offered seven fellowships to early career curators and programmers working in Scotland. Camila Arriaga Torres, Chloe Charlton, Indigo Korres, Jennifer Pert, Joanne Lee, Maria Wrang-Rasmussen and Wacera Kamonji have undertaken the Curate-It course and curated a programme of events responding to the 50th anniversary of the Women’s Film Festival. In 1972, EIFF presented the first global film event entirely dedicated to the cinematic achievements of female directors. Honouring the spirit of the original event, EIFF invited independent collaborators to craft bold, political, and wildly celebratory responses this anniversary.

“Curation gives us the capacity to create entirely new stories for an array of audiences. But the only way for us to expand the ideas and stories on offer, is to push the curatorial doors wide open. The Curate-It platform does this by empowering people with the practical knowledge needed to bring their ideas to the screen. We’re thrilled to be partnering with Aya Films and the participating curators on this programme, we can’t wait to see the stories you’ve dreamed up for us.” – Kristy Matheson Creative Director, EIFF.

The 2022 EIFF & Curate-It Curatorial Fellowship is supported through the Scottish Government’s Festivals Expo Fund. The seven curatorial responses will screen online during EIFF 2022, and the festival will also mark the launch of the Curate-It platform to the general public. View the full programme here.

From Saturday 13 August, curator Jennifer Pert presents Under The Cloud, a programme interested in the changing face of horror cinema as more women make their mark on the genre. It centres around a beautiful example of a modern, female-directed horror film, The Pink Cloud (Iuli Gerbase, Brazil 2021).

From Sunday 14 August, viewers are invited to peek through Queer Kaleidoscopes at different ways of seeing and being seen as a queer person. The collection of films is curated by Maria Wrang-Rasmussen around the theme of queer perceptions, explored through filmmakers working experimentally with the medium of celluloid film.

Curator Chloe Charlton presents (w)hole Earth, from Monday 15 August, a programme dedicated to the displacement and distribution of matter. It constructs and maps a landscape that has calmly formed over millions of years and then disrupts it, observing the possibilities of creation and the impact on those closest to the stone.

In Family Stories: Challenging Tradition, Changing the Future, screening from Tuesday 16 August curator Wacera Kamonji looks at the ties between family, tradition and how it affects a young woman’s future in short films A Birthday Party (Victoria Adeola Thomas, UK, 2022) and  Al-Sit (Suzannah Mirghani, Sudan/Qatar, 2020). 

From Wednesday 17 August, curator Indigo Korres presents (RE)BIRTH, a meditative event featuring films by Brazilian trans feminine people who relate transness to nature in their work. It takes viewers into a new experimental space to experience the “abundance, prosperity and wealth” found in Travestis; a feminine gender identity with its origins in Latin America.

Curator Camila Arriaga’s INGLORIOUS BODIES, screening from Thursday 18 August, interrogates the ways in which the female body has historically been a territory to conquer, dominate and tame. The programme of shorts instead aims to reflect on the representation of the female body as a subject, not as an object. 

Finally, from Friday 19 August, curator Joanne Lee’s programme of short artists moving image through the screen invites you to watch on your desktop, phone or any screen. The works expand and explore how online spaces can become digital gathering spaces, acting as points of connection, disruption and disconnection.

All events will be available to watch for 48 hours on Curate-It’s bespoke VoD platform Screen-it.

“Curate-It is a unique platform that makes information about film curation more widely available. Through doing this we hope to create a space through which people from all over the world can learn the processes of film curation, connect and collaborate. This process has already started with partnerships emerging in the UK, Palestine, Zanzibar, the US and beyond. From here, the ‘Screen-it’ platform will be an exciting gathering of varied perspectives, films and events.” say Curate-It director, Justine Atkinson and producer Carmen Thompson.

Curate-It will launch to the public at The Skinny’s Peripheral Visions special event at EIFF on 15 August. It will be available to purchase from the App Store and Google Play.