Club des Femmes presents:
Rebel Dykes
Sunday 5th December 2021, 2.15pm, Rio cinema, 107 Kingsland High Street, London E8 2PB
Tickets Full £13.50, Student £10.50. Wheelchair £10.50. Snr Citizen £10.50.
Dir. Harri Shanahan, Siân A. Williams. Produced by Siobhan Fahey. UK, 2021, 92mins, cert 18.
Rebel Dykes is a rabble-rousing, sexy, raucous documentary set in 1980s post-punk London that tells the unheard story of a community of dykes who met doing art, music, politics and sex, and how they went onto change the world.
The Rio was also part of this outlaw dyke culture, a radical space where Greenham Common films were screened, Kathy Acker spoke out against Section 28, Lesbian Strength all night parties kicked off, and the Women’s Media Resource Project set out to re-make the world through their lesbian, feminist and queer media activism.
“The rebel dykes laid the foundations for so much of our queer culture. After rebel dykes came the Lesbian Avengers in the 90s, Riot Grrrl and Queercore music, Queer Mutiny. It is thanks to them we can be a part of a queer culture that fits us.”
Watching Rebel Dykes for CDF x Culture Club by Jack Thompson, Cipher Press
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Fireworks Revisited
Dir. Bev Zalcock, UK, 1994, 9 mins
This lesbian classic, a re-working of Kenneth Anger’s homoerotic biker fever dream film, is a heady mix of influences from the avant garde to girl gang movies, Eisenstein to Prisoner Cell Block H. Starring four members of the all-women biker gang The Black Widows who feature in Rebel Dykes and in the Rebel Dykes Art and Archive show.
+ Q&A with director and Black Widow Bev Zalcock, Cherry Smyth (writer), Hannah Milton (Hackney Archives)
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Independent queer publisher Cipher Press will be joining us at the Rio with a front of house book table. Bring your book wishes and desires!