Every February 14, we rehearse the same ritual. Pink cards. Lace. Flowers. The language of possession disguised as devotion: Be mine. Valentine’s Day is framed as soft, sentimental, harmless. But embedded within its rituals is something older — a quiet rehearsal of heterosexual destiny. To be chosen. To be admired. To be desired. The card is not just affection; it is a claim. In 1900, on St Valentine’s Day, a group of schoolgirls climbed Hanging Rock. Some never came back. Pi

Last year, I attended Don’t Shoot Darling: Women’s Independent Filmmaking in Australia, a lecture and screening held at RMIT’s Capitol Theatre in collaboration with the Australian Screen Research Collection. The evening foregrounded a lineage of feminist filmmaking that felt both urgently historical and deeply present — a reminder that women’s cinema has always been political, even when it has been intimate, domestic, or deliberately small. What struck me was not just the his