Video Vera Presents, Video Vera

From the collection of

The Yorkshire Film Archive at York St John University save and celebrate screen heritage made in or about Yorkshire. They connect broad and diverse audiences to their cultural and socially significant collection that reflects the life, landscape, and identity of the people of the region since the 1890s. Together with their sister archive in the North East they form the Yorkshire and North East Film Archive, a unique pan-regional resource with over 75,000 moving image artefacts. They unlock the collections for artists, academics, curators, programmers, researchers, and producers to reveal compelling stories from the vaults. www.yfanefa.com

Video Vera Presents, Video Vera

Yorkshire Film Archive
Leeds
1986
Sound

Sisters are doing it for themselves: women take steps to change the face of independent television production.

In the last decade, PACT (the UK screen sector trade body representing independent production companies) has launched a number of initiatives to tackle inequality in the industry, including The Indie Diversity Scheme, which runs six-month paid trainee placements with independent production companies.

In 2016 PACT launched the Diamond Diversity monitoring system, which gathers data from every area of television production to report on the gender, age, ethnicity and other characteristics of everyone earning a living making television, including freelancers. This data is then used to make targeted interventions to proactively promote a diverse workforce.

This is a promotional video for Video Vera, a Women's video collective. The promo highlights the kinds of work the Collective does as well as some statistics about the lack of women in the film and television production industry. It also notes some of the biased views of the businessmen in charge. Vera suggests there is an alternative and as the song says, for the sisters to do it for themselves.

Presenting Video Vera

Seizing the means of production is the catalyst for change in these innovative feminist films.

Vera Media was a video production and training partnership founded in Leeds by Catherine Mitchell and Al Garthwaite in 1985. They specialised in participatory documentaries as a way to involve, develop and empower a wide variety of socially-excluded groups to tell their own stories through video. Participants were taught technical and creative skills, with an emphasis on giving women control of technology they might traditionally have been excluded from using. For most participants this was an empowering experience which led to increased self-confidence, but it also made a contribution to the wider community beyond the trainees. The completed works always had public showings, for both invited guests and the general public. Communities had an opportunity to see themselves, their geography or their work championed as never before - and the legacy continues in this collection.

10 videos in this collection