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

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is not simply a historical retelling of a saint’s trial; it is a confrontation with how women’s bodies, voices, and faces are scrutinised, doubted, and punished when they exceed the roles assigned to them. Joan of Arc is condemned not only for heresy, but for the far greater crime of certainty — of speaking with conviction in a world that does not believe women are entitled to authority, especially spiritual authority. J

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