Karen Pearlman

Project at the MaCI

April - June 2026

THIS COULD HAPPEN is a creative research project investigating the changes in cinema technologies that are concurrent with specific periods of women’s political history. It aims to illuminate how eruptions of energy in historical women’s movements are entangled with innovation in moving image technologies, processes and aesthetics. THIS COULD HAPPEN asks about the participation of women in moving image production by looking at the creative impacts of newly empowered women on moving image in the early 20th century, the 1970s, and the present.  By studying these three periods I am not only asking about how disruptive technologies change access to tools for women, but how the feminisms of each period inflected their use of those tools.

The project will produce a film that integrates archive with investigative re-enactment to propose a visual, sonic, and rhythmic response to the question: what can we learn about creativity when new technologies disrupt old practices and lower barriers to participation? In our current moment of uncertainty about meaning making with technology and wildfire spread of misinformation and suspicion about feminist movements, this project proposes that a study of the confluence of technological disruption in cinema with social disruption of the status of women historically, can illuminate options for our contemporary dilemmas. THIS COULD HAPPEN will tell a new story of women in cinema by analysing, creating and juxtaposing images of three vibrantly disruptive moments in filmmaking and in feminism.

Research on THIS COULD HAPPEN at the MaCI will generate a draft of a feature-length creative research script, and an ‘onscreen draft’ of some sections of the script. The planned film will integrate archival clips that were produced with substantive participation of women historically, with contemporary investigative re-enactments of collaborative and technology based creative practices. The outcome of this process will be new insights into the ways that social and technological disruptions can catalyse autonomy and agency in creative practice. These visually and rhythmically expressed insights will benefit a culture grappling with what seem like overwhelming disruptions in our technological landscapes and social fabric.