By Tara Judah

At this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, the programme that first caught my eye, and that continues to win me over with its intelligent and entertaining questions around gender and identity, is Pioneering Women. Presented in association with the National Film and Sound Archive and co-curated by critic and broadcaster Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, the programme’s intent was to shine a light on, “amazing and sometimes under-seen Australian should-be classics directed by women and made in the 1980s and early 1990s.