Film Studies’ Barbara Zecchi’s 2023 Work Makes BFI’s List for Best Video Essay of the Year

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For the third consecutive year, Director of Film Studies Barbara Zecchi and her videographic work has been included in the list of Best Video Essays of the Year by the monthly film magazine Sight and Sound, published by the British Film Institute (BFI), the United Kingdom’s lead organization for film.

This year’s list recognized Zecchi’s video essay, “Filling (Feeling) the Archival Void: The Case of Helena Cortesina’s Flor de España,” first published in the October 2023 issue of Feminist Media Histories. The essay delves into the systematic erasure and archival dispossession of works by early women filmmakers, using the case study of Helena Cortesina and her lost film, “Flor de España”(1922), which was falsely attributed to a male director.

“Zecchi gets my vote for video essayist of the year for her prolific, always brilliant videographic work,” says video essayist and film scholar, Catherine Grant. “This particular video, ‘Filling (Feeling) the Archival Void: The Case of Helena Cortesina’s Flor de España,’ published in issue 9(4) of the journal Feminist Media Histories, is extraordinary.”

“[Zecchi’s] voice as well as her embodied, emotive presence on the screen are intrinsic features of a project that deploys videographic tools to sustain what she calls a ‘practice-based counter archive’ capable of reversing the ongoing ‘dispossession’ of women’s contributions to media history,” Feminist Media Histories editor Jennifer Bean wrote in her introductory essay for the issue.

BFI’s annual poll spotlights 181 unique video essays, nominated by 48 international voters, showcasing the breadth and depth of current videographic practice. For more information, visit the BFI Best Video Essays of 2023 website.