Barbara Zecchi Wins Best Experimental Film Award at the 2026 Montreal Women Film Festival

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Barbara Zecchi, professor of film studies and Spanish and Portuguese studies and director of the Film Studies Program at UMass Amherst, has won the 2026 Montreal Women Film Festival Award for Best Experimental Film for The Rhythms of Rage, a videoessay exploring representations of women's anger in global screen media.

The award follows recognition of the work in both academic and film festival contexts. The Rhythms of Rage was voted Best Video Essay of 2024 in the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound poll, screened at New York's Museum of the Moving Image as part of its "Video Essay as the New Avant-Garde" series, and was selected by international festivals in Europe, Asia, and North America.

"I was already very happy to be included in the official selection of the Montreal Women Film Festival," says Zecchi. "Winning the award is particularly meaningful because it extends that recognition and affirms the relevance of videographic scholarship within a wider international festival landscape."

The Rhythms of Rage is a videographic essay, a form of scholarship that uses moving images and sound to develop an argument. The work has reached scholars of film and media as well as critics, curators, and festival audiences.

To read more about the work, you can visit https://intransition.openlibhums.org/article/id/20293/.