Hysterical Females

The original concept of the film was to narrate the story of women’s suffrage and mark the 100th anniversary in 2018. The majority of us know about the history of suffragettes: the force-feeding, the protests, the breaking of windows, so I wanted to look at it from a different angle, focusing on the core of the problem which was the men’s behaviour towards women. This led me to look at the discrimination against Edwardian women in general, starting from girlhood. Why were young girls encouraged to suppress their ambitions? Why was marriage the only vocation for women? Why didn’t politicians take women seriously? I wanted to communicate some of these obstacles in my film. I didn’t want to approach women’s history in a literal way, so instead I decided to create a surreal world but show historical behaviours, attitudes and beliefs. In Hysterical Females the protagonist is subjected to discrimination through the eyes of a politician, a husband and dowager. In order to review current discrimination against women I combined relevant contemporary and Edwardian political quotes. Are these Edwardian perceptions of women still embedded in our society today? I love working with collage and chose to use this method for the film using disjointed sounds with the combined techniques of stop motion, live action and animation aimed to create a powerful emotive piece. In order to communicate with a broad audience I introduced playful and theatrical characters to narrate and represent the story. I believe a playful element can engage attention more effectively than bare facts!