Kim Longinotto


Kim Longinotto is a British documentary film maker, well known for making films that highlight the plight of female victims of oppression or discrimination. Longinotto has made more than 20 films, usually featuring inspiring women and girls at their core. Her subjects have included female genital mutilation in Kenya, women standing up to rapists in India, and the story of Salma, an Indian Muslim woman who smuggled poetry out to the world while locked up by her family for decades.

Early life

Born Kimona Sally-Anne Longinotto- Landseer to an Italian father and a Welsh mother February 8, 1950; her father was a photographer who later went bankrupt. At the age of 10 she was sent to a draconian all-girls boarding school, where she found it hard to make friends due to the mistress forbidding anyone to talk to her for a term after she became lost during a school trip. She discovered that her 'Landseer ' surname was a made-up name, so she dropped the Landseer surname and just kept Longinotto. After a period of homelessness, she went to Essex University, where she studied English literature and writing. She later followed friend and future filmmaker Nick Broomfield to the National Film and Television School. While studying, she made Pride of Place, a documentary about her boarding school that was shown at the London Film Festival.

Career

Longinotto is an observational filmmaker. Observational cinema, also known as direct cinema, free cinema or cinema verite, usually excludes certain documentary techniques such as advanced planning, scripting, staging, narration, lighting, re-enactment and interviewing. Longinotto's unobtrusiveness, which is an important part of observational documentary, gives the women on camera a certain voice and presence that might not have emerged with another documentary genre.
She runs a production company, Vixen Films, which she founded in 1988 with Claire Hunt under the name Twentieth Century Vixen Productions.

Filmography