“I have made so little”: what the archives of two women filmmakers tell us about the film industry

“It’s funny to think that I have made so little and yet accumulated this body of work. Perhaps this is what often happens to women artists, writers, filmmakers. Opportunities to properly launch work are rare, but we continue to create, to produce.” 

This is BAFTA-nominated filmmaker, academic and equality campaigner Tina Gharavi’s intriguing statement in the press release announcing the BFI National Archive’s acquisition of her personal papers. Instead of celebrating the milestone as a marker of her formidable achievements – including award-winning productions Closer (2001), I Am Nasrine (2012) and Tribalism Is Killing Us (2019) – what matters to Gharavi, she elaborated, is the ability “to show the process of making the work” and that her archive stands as “a legacy” for other “diverse” and “untraditional” cultural producers who are drastically underrepresented within the male-dominated and overwhelmingly white British filmmaking industry.

Comprising production papers, working notes, scripts, storyboards, correspondence, photographs, research and press cuttings, Gharavi’s meticulously organised archive does exactly what she envisages: while laying bare the barriers facing women filmmakers, it simultaneously gives us insight into her creative ingenuity. The many applications Gharavi submitted to quibbling funding bodies, both regional and national, make it dispiritingly clear, for example, just how tough it is to get projects about diasporic experience and migration off the ground, and how often said projects are criticised, sometimes simultaneously, for being either too ambitious and or not expansive enough. 

On the flip side, Gharavi’s papers reveal her ability to work across a breadth of contexts – including television, fine and community art, academia and commercial cinema – as well her extraordinary capacity to make the most of creative opportunities. Take, for instance, her notebooks, which – full of paintings, literary texts and scholarly references – not only detail Gharavi’s evolving ideas and innumerable refinements of expression but also operate as artistic objects in their own right.

The Gharavi collection represents one of two paper archives presently being catalogued and researched as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project Women’s Screen Work in Archives Made Visible (2024 to 2028), led from the University of Exeter. The other documents the some 35-year-long career of one of Britain’s most prolific women filmmakers, Gurinder Chadha, known for blockbusters such as Bend It like Beckham (2002) and Blinded by the Light (2019) as well as several more overtly political shorts, such as I’m British But… (1990).

Chadha’s paper archive consists of production materials as well as scripts, storyboards, notes, correspondence, photographs and publicity materials. Her digital archive is also being catalogued as part of the Our Screen Heritage project*. Chadha says she donated both archives to the BFI partly because she appreciates its value as “an important history of British Asian cinema” to future generations of filmmakers. While in many ways distinct, the collections also have many things in common: for example, like Gharavi, Chadha has worked across a range of disciplines, including radio and television as well as in cinema, while both women have established independent production companies.

Like Gharavi’s, Chadha’s collection also testifies to the director’s commitment to her craft. Indeed, it’s worth emphasising that even the most commercially successful of Chadha’s productions were rarely unreservedly supported by investors, as her correspondence with a variety of production companies makes abundantly clear. The script, for example, of what would become one of the highest-grossing British films on record, Bend It like Beckham, initially “disappointed” one financing executive, who misconstrued Chadha’s foregrounding of a female friendship between the protagonist Jesminder ‘Jess’ Bhamra (Parminder Nagra) and Jules (Keira Knightley) as an erroneous “lesbian” plotline. 

Even more startling, to a contemporary eye, is the sheer number of projects that Chadha never got to make because they were dismissed by male television and film commissioners, not because they were no good but rather because they focused on so-called “minority” subjects – such as Bhangra groups – or they took the “wrong” kind of feminist angle.

Far from being thwarted by these setbacks, Chadha repeatedly responds to such criticism with grace and dignity while simultaneously doing her utmost to ensure the success of the many films she wrote, directed and produced. Chadha’s papers reveal, for instance, how rather than shelving her ideas she repeatedly drafted and redrafted her scripts and conducted a breadth of research about an array of subjects, ranging from specialist football techniques to post-colonial theory. Likewise, the painstakingly drawn storyboards and carefully curated soundtracks in Chadha’s collection show the significance she attaches to delivering both visual and sonic pleasure for viewers.

Offering audiences a unique opportunity to hear Gharavi and Chadha speak about their highly personal collections, BFI archivists Wendy Russell and Grace Johnston, who have been investigating the filmmakers’ archives as part of their respective Our Screen Heritage and Women’s Screen Work projects, have curated a season of events this January, which explore both filmmakers’ prescient work. 

As part of the season, the filmmakers will be joined not only by leading academics Professor Shelley Cobb and Professor Linda Williams but also by contemporary artists Athen Kardashian and Nina Mhach Durban who, having been granted privileged access to Chadha’s paper and digital archive, have produced a new installation, Even if the world forgets me, you please don’t (2026). Currently on display on the mezzanine at BFI Southbank, this remarkable work testifies to the pair’s sensitive engagement with Chadha’s enduringly relevant practice and the profound influence it has had on their own creativity.

*Our Screen Heritage project is supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery Funding.

The research for this article was enabled by the AHRC-funded Women’s Screen Work in Archives Made Visible Project, grant: AH/Z50595X/1, on which Jessica Boyall is a Postdoctoral Research Associate cataloguing and researching Gurinder Chadha’s papers.