Initiative Documents Hundreds of Previously Unrecorded Female Filmmakers for Film History Today, AFI released the results of their groundbreaking gender study focused on silent era films. The project, titled Women They Talk About after the 1928 feature film, is an initiative documenting the widely unrecorded contributions of female filmmakers in the silent film era and...

This month, AFI celebrates the world’s first female director, Alice Guy Blaché, who made more than 700 films in a career that spanned from 1896 to 1920. Starting out as Alice Guy in her homeland France as a secretary for motion-picture camera manufacturer Léon Gaumont, she was one of the few in attendance at Lumiere’s...

Funding To Support Unprecedented Research On Short Films And Diversity In Early Hollywood The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced today that AFI has been awarded a $350,000 grant to embark upon a landmark initiative to study thousands of short films released in the silent and early sound eras. Titled Behind the Veil after...

Women were forerunners of the film industry. In honor of Women’s History Month, the AFI Catalog Spotlight is focused on Women They Talk About, an NEH-funded AFI initiative documenting the widely unrecorded contributions of female filmmakers in the silent film era and uncovering the true story of women’s pioneering role in the creation of American...

In celebration of the centennial anniversary of Women’s Suffrage, the AFI Catalog has been rapidly expanding its stores of information regarding the foundational influence of female filmmaking in the silent era—and making it accessible for free at AFI.com. Behind the camera and in front, women were prolific contributors to the establishment of narrative cinema, but their names have…