Highlighting rising women directors alongside ground-breaking pioneers, this is a one-stop guide to the leading women film directors in the 21st century, and those who inspired them. This collection of essays, by an impressive array of international writers, examines the progress of women film directors around the world, and arrives at some surprising conclusions.
From the blockbusters of the Hollywood studios to emerging voices from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Laos, we learn of women making films in traditionally male-dominated areas such as action, fantasy and horror. With wide-ranging contributions from countries with mature and nascent film industries, "Celluloid Ceiling" demonstrates that economic and technological changes are creating new opportunities for women film directors everywhere.
With contributions from Africa, Latin America, Europe, USA, Asia and India, chapters on new voices in Japanese and Middle Eastern cinema, the book also covers women directors working in TV, and reminds us of the first woman director, Frenchwoman, Alice Guy Blache. Exploring the rise of the independent film sector including the horror aficionados the Soska Sisters, "Celluloid Ceiling" asks whether economic and technological change will work to the advantage of women in film.
"Celluloid Ceiling" follows in the footsteps of Supernova's "Women Make Noise," which lifted the lid on the widespread and destructive misogyny that still plagues the rock music world.

Gaze Regimes is a bricolage of essays and interviews showcasing the experiences of women working in film, either directly as practitioners or in other areas as curators, festival programme directors or fundraisers. It does not shy away from questioning the relations of power in the practice of filmmaking and the power invested in the gaze itself. Who is looking and who is being looked at, who is telling women's stories in Africa and what governs the mechanics of making those films on the continent? The interviews with film practitioners such as Tsitsi Dangarembga, Taghreed Elsanhouri, Jihan El-Tahri, Anita Khanna, Isabel Noronhe, Arya Lalloo and Shannon Walsh demonstrate the contradictory points of departure of women in film - from their understanding of feminisms in relation to lived-experiences and the realpolitik of women working as cultural practitioners. The disciplines of gender studies, postcolonial theory, and film theory provide the framework for the book's essays. Jyoti Mistry, Antje Schuhmann, Nobunye Levin, Dorothee Wenner and Christina von Braun are some of the contributors who provide valuable context, analysis and insight into, among other things, the politics of representation, the role of film festivals and the collective and individual experiences of trauma and marginality which contribute to the layered and complex filmic responses of Africa's film practitioners.