Kim Longinotto began her journey into filmmaking with the foundation course at Bristol University, which was set up by George Brandt. From there she went to the National Film and Television School, which enabled her to make her first film, Pride of Place (1976), a critical portrait of her former boarding school in Coventry. Longinotto’s films are characterised by a passionate commitment to the lives of women who struggle against myriad forms of oppression – by families, partners, schools, institutions, the law, sexual and gendered norms. Longinotto’s participatory, intimate and joyful filmmaking shines a light on the ways in which women navigate these spaces and relationships and on their unswerving attempts to change the world, one small act of repair at a time. Longinotto’s films include Hidden Faces (1990, CableACE award), Shinjuku Boys (1995, San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Outstanding Documentary), Divorce Iranian Style (1998, BAFTA Flaherty Documentary Award), Gaea Girls (2000), The Day I Will Never Forget (2002, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Humanitarian Award), Sisters in Law (2005, Cannes, C.I.C.A.E. Award), Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go (2007), Rough Aunties (2008, Sundance, Grand Jury Prize), Pink Saris (2010, CPH:DOX, Amnesty Award), Salma (2013), Dreamcatcher (2015, Sundance, Directing).

Kim Longinotto (born 1952) is a British documentary filmmaker, well known for making films that highlight the plight of female victims of oppression or discrimination. Longinotto studied camera and directing at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, England, where she now tutors occasionally. Longinotto was born to an Italian father and a Welsh mother; 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. After a period of homelessness, Longinotto went on to Essex University to study English and European literature and later followed friend and future filmmaker, Nick Broomfield to the National Film and Television School. While studying, she made a documentary about her boarding school that was shown at the London Film Festival, since when she has continued to be a prolific documentary filmmaker. 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, reenactment and interviewing. Longinotto’s unobtrusiveness, which is an important part of observational documentary, gives the women on camera a certain voice and presence that may not have emerged with another documentary genre. She has received a number of awards for her films over the years, including a BAFTA for her documentary Pink Saris.

Kim Longinotto, one of the foremost documentary filmmakers working today, is best known for filming women’s stories in an observational style. She has worked around the world in countries including Japan, Iran, Africa, India and the UK. Her films include Rough Aunties (2009), which won a World Cinema Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go (2007), Sisters in Law (2005), which won the Prix Art et Essai at the Cannes Film Festival, and Divorce Iranian Style, which won a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award (BAFTA). Her work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, in 2009. She teaches at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, UK, and lives in London.