Our Past Extraordinary Women Events

Over the years, we have presented documentaries and discussions at the Revue Cinema about many Extraordinary Women, from the famous to the forgotten, from the prominent to the obscure. Here’s a list of some of our past events with links to information about the women, the films and our expert presenters.

2023:

Hildegard of Bingen still fascinates more than eight centuries after she lived, and the Revue Cinema was filled for the documentary In the Symphony of the World: A Portrait of Hildegard of Bingen. We were thrilled to have Schola Magdalena perform Hildegard’s chants and musician Stephanie Martin and author Teri Degler for our post-film Q&A. Thanks to everyone for joining us! Over the years, we have held several events featuring the medieval visionary, and always have had a full house.
Our fund-raising screening of Sarah Polley’s Oscar-winning film Women Talking with guest Sheila McCarthy raised more than $1,500 for Women’s Habitat of Etobicoke. Read more here.
Under the Willow Tree: Pioneer Chinese Women in Canada with film director Dora Nipp and historian Arlene Chan as our guests for the discussion. Read more about the event here.
Anglo-Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray featured in the documentary Gray Matters, with New York-based architect Jan Greben. Read more here.
Russian-born Toronto artist Paraskeva Clark with a short documentary and panel, which included film director Gail Singer, Paraskeva’s granddaughter Panya Clark Espinal, art historian Mary Evans McLachlan and art historian Anna Hudson. A great session! More here.

Other Past Events:

Extraordinary Women in Tehran: May 12, 2023

Film director Mahtab Mansour in her documentary Talk Radio Tehran introduces us to women who have embraced traditionally male jobs in a country with strict gender rules.

We meet Madam Nosrat, who works 16 hours a day driving a bus in which women sit in the front and men, contrary to normal practice, at the back. Rally car driver Zohreh Vatankhah began racing when she was barely 22 and has successfully challenged her male competitors. Sepidah Hosseini, who holds a black belt in judo, is a rock climber, violin player and holds a master’s degree in architecture, is a firefighter, part of an all-female team.

What are their lives like? How are they accepted? What difficulties did Mahtab face in making the film? How have conditions and the mood changed in Iran since she made the film?

Producer Terry Ward and Mahtab will join us for a Q&A on Zoom following the screening to discuss some of these questions. Terry, who grew up in Saudi Arabia and Iran, will help us understand the current situation in Iran and how it fits into the confusing conflicts of the Middle East.

Mark the date: Friday, May 12, 3:30-5:30pm at the Revue Cinema. Tickets are $10 in advance on Eventbrite, $12 at the door.

About Mahtab Mansour:

Born In Iran, Mahtab Mansour grew up in Tehran. She left for Paris in 1980 and studied Science of Art at the Sorbonne, and then pursued her studies in Cinema. After completing her Masters degree, she returned to Iran where she taught Film Criticism and Semiology at Teheran University. As the director of the Cinematography Research Institute from 1995 to 1997, she organized in association with UNESCO, France, the first seminars on International Women in Contemporary Cinema. For two years, she was also responsible of the first Documentary Film Festival in Isfahan. She co-produced 32 documentaries and short films for Iranian TV, and directed a documentary on the Ghashghai tribes, and a series on Iranian women in the Persian Gulf. Currrently, Mahtab lives in Paris.

About Terry Ward:

Terry is a writer, documentary producer and cross-cultural consultant on the Middle East. For 25 years, he has advised companies, foundations and governments. Born in Boulder, Colorado, he grew up in Saudi Arabia and Iran. He received his BA in political science at the University of California at Berkeley. Continuing his studies in Egypt at the American University of Cairo, he specialized in Near Eastern history and contemporary Islamic political movements. Later, he received his MBA from the International Management Institute (IMI) in Geneva.

His first book, Searching for Hassan: A Journey to the Heart of Iran, is a chronicle of his family’s odyssey back to Iran after 30 years (Houghton Mifflin, Random House 2003) as they search for the much-loved man who worked for them. The Persian Center of Northern California recognized Terry’s work for promoting peace through cultural awareness with their Global Recognition Award, while in L.A., the Iranian Muslim Association of North America honoured him for “enhancing knowledge of Iranian culture.” Simon & Schuster published a new updated edition in 2020.

His latest book, The Wahhabi Code: How the Saudis Spread Extremism Globally, takes a critical look at the role of Saudi Arabia in fostering jihadi extremism in the Islamic World and beyond (Arcade Publishing, 2018). He was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour on CNN about this complex issue. (Watch the interview here.)

He has been interviewed on BBC, CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS, C-SPAN, and RAI-TV. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, CNN, The Ecologist (Italian), Il Manifesto, Airone, Reset, and Conde Nast Traveler. His views on the Sunni-Shiite conflict have been cited in The New York Times.

His documentary “Talk Radio Tehran” (2016) won Best Short Film at the Middle East Now Festival in Florence and aired on BBC for the International Day of the Woman (2018).

With his wife, Idanna Pucci, he lives in Florence, Italy and New York.

The Queen of Crime: World’s top-selling author!

We were back at the Revue Cinema Sunday, March 12 with the first Extraordinary Women screening and discussion for 2023, this time about Agatha Christie, the best-selling novelist of all time! She recently, it is said, passed Shakespeare for the number of books sold! (How they manage to count that is anybody’s guess!)

How did a beautiful, young English woman born in 1890, with barely any formal education, manage to become such a successful writer? What is it in her detective novels that have made them so popular? What gave rise to the crime genre and why was Christie, of all of the writers, able to ride that wave so successfully?

Our speaker was Janice Kulyk Keefer. A professor emerita at Guelph University, she has recently taken a deep dive into the ocean of crime fiction and is ready to lead us into an understanding of Christie and her world of sleuths, murderers and mystery.

By any measure, Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was an Extraordinary Woman. Consider these achievements:

Estimated to be the best-selling author of all time, she wrote 66 crime novels, 6 non-crime novels, 150 short stories and more than 30 plays.
Her books have been published in over 100 languages, landing her a record as the most translated author.
Some 50 films in English and other languages have been based on her work, along with countless TV shows, games and puzzles.
Her play, The Mousetrap, is the longest running play in history, from 1952 in London until 2020 when the Covid pandemic forced it to close. It reopened in November, 2022.

Here are some interesting details about her life:

Her father, an American, inherited a fortune from his grandfather, but lived far beyond his means. Her English mother was the dominant presence in Agatha’s life. The absence of money became an issue for the family and is a constant theme in her books.
Agatha grew up in a gracious Victorian villa in the seaside town of Torquay, a genteel setting she recreated in many of her novels. Her childhood was a somewhat solitary one, with her two older siblings gone from the family home.
She taught herself to read at age 4 even though her mother, for some reason, did not want her to learn before the age of 8.
In 1908, her mother, to save money, organized Agatha’s social debut in Cairo rather than in London. Agatha’s stay in Egypt in the ex-pat milieu inspired an unpublished first novel, Snow Upon the Desert.
Agatha was beautiful and had many suitors. She turned down some five proposals before she fell in love with and married Archie Christie. Biographer Lucy Worsley describes the handsome young Archie, who joined the Royal Flying Corps, as “hot.”
In 1926, Archie asked for a divorce so he could marry his lover. It was too much for Agatha, who was devastated by her mother’s death earlier in the year and was also under pressure for work. She suffered some kind of breakdown and “disappeared.” Thousands searched for her in the countryside where her car was found. She was identified at a hotel in Harrogate 10 days later where she was using the same last name as Archie’s girlfriend. Despite her assertions of amnesia, her disappearance generated bad publicity for her, with people claiming she was looking for publicity, or worse, she wanted Archie to be charged with her murder.
Many aspects of her life – her interest in music, her life as an imaginative child, her work as a nurse during the war, her amnesia – are explored in a novel Giant’s Bread, written under her pseudonym Mary Westmacott.
Agatha met her second husband, an archeologist, on a trip she took to Mesopotamia. Max Mallowan was 14 years her junior. From all accounts, their marriage appears to have been a happy one.
MI5 once investigated her because they feared she had knowledge of the secret work done at Bletchley Park to crack German communication codes. In a wartime novel, she named one of her characters Major Bletchley. Apparently, she chose that name after being stuck on a train at Bletchley; she sought revenge by naming one of her least attractive characters after the place!
Agatha had one child, Rosalind, but she was by no means a maternal type. When Rosalind was 2, Archie and Agatha took off on around-the-world business trip, leaving their toddler in the care of her aunt.
Agatha loved fast cars, dogs and swimming. She is reputedly the first western woman to manage to ride a surfboard.
She always found a little corner of a room to write in; she didn’t need “a room of her own.”

Daphne du Maurier: Secrets, jealousy and passion

When we consider Daphne du Maurier, we usually think of her novel Rebecca — the Cinderella story set in a Gothic mansion, clouded by secrets, jealousy, passion and moral ambiguity. Who was the woman who wrote this and other stories that inspired three of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies and caught the imagination of many other filmmakers and TV producers?

No question she was a popular novelist, but she addresses complex themes through her work that are reflected in her own life. Former Unviersity of Guelph literature professor and author Janice Kulyk Keefer will introduce the documentary, which will provide us with some biographical basics, and lead a discussion and Q&A following the film.

Du Maurier struggled with gender identity, describing her own psyche as “the boy in the box.” She was also influenced deeply by place, in particular a crumbling Cornwall house called Menabilly, which served as inspiration for Manderley in Rebecca and became her home after the novel’s success. (Menabilly proved less inspiring for her children: her oldest daughter remembered it for the “cold, hunger and rats.”)

Janice, a specialist in modernist literature, has joined us for past Extraordinary Women, including a session on Virginia Woolf. More recently, she presented a talk on Zoom about the Ukrainian poet, playwright, essayist and translator Lesia Ukrainka, who is honoured by a statue in Toronto’s High Park.

For those interested in renewing their acquaintance with the author, Janice had two recommendations: the novel My Cousin Rachel, which plays with our tendency to jump to conclusions, and the biography George, A Portrait, about her father.

Lesia Ukrainka (1871-1913): A Short Life and a Remarkable Body of Work

There’s a statue of a woman in High Park, shadowed by pine trees and surrounded by fences next to Dog Hill. You have perhaps heard that she was a Ukrainian writer. Fortunately, Janice Kulyk Keefer, herself a poet, novelist, critic and professor emerita from Guelph University, will help us understand who Lesia Ukrainka was, what she accomplished and the historical context. Ukrainka was among the accomplished Ukrainian writers and intelligentsia who struggled to preserve their language and culture. Janice presented a two-part illustrated talk on Zoom Wednesday, June 1 and June 8, 2021 at 7:00 p.m.

Watch the sessions on video. Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.

Read Janice’s talk by clicking here for Part 1 and here for Part 2. For a bibliography of Lesia Ukrainka’s, click here.

Our attendees donated a total of $700 to register for the Zoom sessions. We donated the funds to Friends of the Mennonite Centre in Ukraine, a Canadian charity with a two-decade history of humanitarian work in Ukraine. Please coonsider making a small donation to a Ukrainian charity of your choice if you are watching the lecture through YouTube.

Ukrainka was born Larysa Petrivna Kosach, but when she published her first poem at 13, her mother gave her the pen name, which means Lesia the Ukrainian woman. Born in 1871, she suffered most of her short 42-year life from tuberculosis of the bone, a crippling, debilitating disease. Yet, She still managed a prodigious output of translations of European and ancient classics, essays, poetry, short stories and plays.

In her talk, Janice, who is of Ukrainian background and has written two novels on Ukrainian themes as well as a family memoir, explored Ukrainka’s background, her political and feminist views and the significance of her writing. Janice will also shed light on Ukraine’s complex history and the centuries-long struggle to defend its language and culture.

Here are some of Ukrainka’s remarkable accomplishments:

Despite her debilitating illness, she was a prolific writer — a poet, playwright, essayist and translator.
She knew at least 10 languages and translated into Ukrainian from German, French, English, Sanskrit, ancient Greek, Egyptian and more.
The struggle for freedom is a constant theme in her writing. A feminist, she also broke with social conventions, living common law for some years and marrying only so that her partner could secure a job.
She was talented musically, but had to abandon the piano at a young age following an operation on her hands. After her death, her husband, a musician, transcribed some 200 folk songs she had sung to him.
At age 19, she wrote a textbook for her siblings The Ancient History of Eastern Peoples, exploring the beliefs and literature of the Middle East and India, a remarkable feat of research. It was published in 1918, and republished in a facsimile edition 90 years later.
Her poetic drama, The Stone Post, written late in her life, explores the Don Juan legend. In her feminist version, Ukrainka’s Donna Anna, not Don Juan, is the one who, through manipulation, holds the power.

Janice, who lives in Roncesvalles, is a specialist in modernist literature. She has given some terrific talks for our Extraordinary Women series, including one about Virginia Woolf. She was also presenting a lecture series at the studio — For Better or Worse — Mostly Worse — about literary couples who write. It was, unfortunately, interrupted by Covid lockdowns in 2020.

Gertrude Bell (1868-1926): The Female Lawrence of Arabia

Sunday, March 8, 2020: 11:00 a.m. at the Revue Cinema

In the documentary, Letters from Baghdad, actor Tilda Swinton reads from the copious writings of Gertrude Bell, an Oxford-educated woman, mountaineer, archeologist, traveller, writer and photographer.

She spent years in the Middle East, where she mastered Arabic, Persian and Ottoman languages, learned the intricacies of tribal relationships in the region and earned the trust of Arab leaders. She went on to play an important role in establishing modern-day Iraq and choosing its king.

Guelph professor emeritus Michael Keefer will help us understand Bell’s unique contributions in the Middle East and brief us on how political decisions made in Bell’s day underpin today’s crises. Given her deep knowledge of the region, Bell foresaw many of the tumultuous problems to come – except, perhaps, for the heavy hand of the United States. Michael’s writings include essays on Palestinian rights, the war in Iraq and threats of war against Iran.

Watch the trailer.

Ruth Berlau (1906 to 1974): A creative force whose work was used by her lover, Bertolt Brecht

Sunday, Feb. 9, 10:30 a.m. at the Revue Cinema

For sure you’ve heard of the famous playwright Bertolt Brecht. Chances are, though, the name Ruth Berlau is unknown. to you.

Strong, smart and adventurous, she was born in Denmark . As a teenager, she took off on a bicycle trip through France, sending back dispatches to a newspaper. Her reports, largely fictionalized, won her a great following in her native country by the time she returned. A Communist, she went on to become an actor with the Royal Danish Theatre, and was running a workers’ theatre group by the age of 22.

Along the way, she fatefully met and fell passionately in love with Brecht, a serial womanizer who had a habit of bedding his assistants and relying on them for their ideas and their work. As one commentator put it, Brecht was the only man he knew of who slept his way to the top.

Berlau was his secretary, translator and collaborator for more than a decade. Her input formed the basis of some of his most celebrated plays. She received no credit and was actually cheated by Brecht out of a contractual payment for her work on a screenplay when they were working in the U.S. Berlau died impoverished in Berlin in 1974.

Join us at the Revue Cinema for an excellent documentary, titled Red Ruth: A Deadly Longing. The hour-long film, featuring Liv Ullmann voicing the words of Ruth, won best film in 1994 in Denmark’s Oscar-equivalents.

We are fortunate to have two guest speakers, Janice Kulyk Keefer and Philippa Sheppard, to help us explore Berlau and Brecht’s lives and work, as well as highlight other women in Brecht’s circle, including his talented actor-wife Helene Weigel.

Janice, professor emerita at Guelph University, is a specialist in modernist literature, and herself a novelist and poet. (She will also be introducing a three-part lecture series on other couples who write: For Better or Worse — Mostly Worse.)

Philippa Sheppard, a lecturer at University of Toronto, has taught courses in Brecht. She recently published a study of film versions of Shakespeare, titled Devouring Time: Nostalgia in Contemporary Shakesperean Screen Adaptations. (Both Janice and Philippa live in Roncesvalles/High Park).

Read more about the documentary here. Buy tickets in advance on Eventbrite for $11; $15 at the door.

The Beaver Hall Group of Painters, contemporaries of the Group of Seven

Sunday, July 21, 2019,11 a.m. at The Revue

While the all-male Group of Seven made their iconic paintings of Canada as wilderness, an equally bold, modern painting movement flourished in Montreal. The Beaver Hall Group, less well-known today, explored modern city life – and its most outstanding contributors, arguably, were women.

The NFB documentary, By Woman’s Hand, reveals the lives and work of three leading members in the group, formed in 1920 – Prudence Heward’s searching character studies and highly controversial nudes, Ann Savage’s art deco landscapes and Sarah Robertson’s over-the-wall glimpses of convent life.

The Beaver Hall group created an artistic environment of mutual support that lasted for more than three decades.

Our Guest Speaker: We are thrilled, once again, to have Gerta Moray, Professor Emerita at Guelph University, to discuss the Beaver Hall Group and the significance of the work they did. Gerta writes and lectures on modern and contemporary art, Canadian art and women’s art and feminist theory.

Tickets: $10 in advance on Eventbrite; $15 at the door.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, the creator of Canada’s best-loved character, Anne of Green Gables

Sunday afternoon, June 9, 2019, 4 p.m. at the Revue Cinema. Buy advance tickets on Eventbrite.

While In the last decade of her life, Montgomery and her husband lived in a house on Riverside Dr. in Swansea. the only house they ever owned. In contrast to the happy endings in her novels, Montgomery’s last years were anything but happy, marked by depression and financial worries, rejection by the literary community and concerns about her children. This will be a fascinating afternoon! Click here for more information about the event. Buy advance tickets on Eventbrite.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Baroque Painter, 1593 – c. 1656.

At the Revue Cinema, Sunday, April 14, 2019 @ 11 a.m. Tickets: $10 on Eventbrite; $15 at the door.

Artemisia Gentileschi, the daughter of a painter, favoured strong women from mythological and biblical stories as subjects in many of her paintings. The scenes are visceral, often violent, as this rendition of Judith slaying Holofernes, dating from 1614–20. In the story from the Bible, Judith, a beautiful Jewish widow beheads the Assyrian general, who was going to destroy her city.

We screened a documentary about Gentileschi’s challenging life and art, with two guest speakers, art historian Gerta Moray and historian Elizabeth Cohen, who has delved deeply into court records in Rome to glean details of delay life in Italy during the 16th and 17th century. Elizabeth has also written about Artemisia’s letters to her patron/lover and about the trial of her rapist and tutor. Read more about the event here.

Hildegard of Bingen

An Extraordinary turnout for an Extraordinary Woman! Thanks to everyone who came to our Hildegard of Bingen screening and discussion Sunday, Jan. 20. It was a bitter morning, but the cinema was full. On the panel, from left below: medieval art historian Rebecca Golding; vocalist Krystina Lewicki, who played a bandura to accompany herself; author Teri Degler, who discussed Hildegard’s visionary experiences and remarkable creativity, and Ellen Moorhouse from Back Lane Studios.

Back Lane Studios has been running the Extraordinary Women Series at the Revue Cinema for a number of years to raise some funds for our programs. We have enjoyed many afternoons and mornings learning about such accomplished women as Virginia Woolf, Ada Byron Lovelace, Emily Carr, Louisa May Alcott, Hedy Lamarr, Rachel Carson and Hannah Arendt

Read more about the following women and events we have had: