Films on Women and Work This session of the festival features three films that focus on women's lives affected by class and the conditions of their working life, their span examining many years of women's histories, from the depression through to contemporary times. Happy Birthday Charmyne, 2007, by Heidi Gledhill is an extraordinary short documentary about a woman named Charmyne who works as a beautician, specialising in spray tanning clients. Charmyne will represent so much to many viewers, her family representative of the change from the nuclear model. Charmyne's partner, Eddie, Eddie is a rehab success story, gay and acts as father to her children. Bread and Dripping, 1981, by Margot Nash features the recollections of four women of raising families during the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s. The interviews are intercut with historical footage of the living conditions of both white and Indigenous families and footage showing events of the time such as protest marches and the Glebe Militant Women’s Group. For Love or Money, 1983, is a collaborative documentary project by Megan McMurchy, Margot Nash, Margot Oliver and Jeni Thornley that researches a history of women and work in Australia, from 1788 to 1983. "Meticulous research unearthed an extensive collection of material – feature films, home movies, news and newsreels, documentaries, television shows, commercials, photographs, radio shows, diaries, popular music, letters and interviews – dating back to the 18th century and showing women, of every decade and every background, at work in all its myriad forms. Over five years in the making, the film – an epic 109 minutes long – is set out in four parts: Hard Labour (1788–1914), Daughters of Toil (1914–1939), Working for the Duration (1939–1969) and Work of Value (1969–1983). A narration by Noni Hazlehurst connects hundreds of excerpts from hundreds of historical sources, painstakingly collected and reproduced. At a time when historical footage reproduction meant interpositives and internegatives, and costings per feet and frames, it’s almost impossible to imagine the methodical cataloguing and ordering of the material involved." - Adrienne Parr, Screen Australia "While the story of the Suffragettes, the fight for equal pay for women and the historical struggle for equality for women that continues into the present day is greatly informative, the issue for Indigenous women is one of racism as well as sexism, for the struggle for liberty of Indigenous women, like Indigenous men, is the struggle against racism." - Romaine Moreton, Indigenous curator of Screen Australia