Harriet video reports TUES 11 MARCH

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Harriet video reports TUES 11 MARCH

Published on March 20, 2009 | Written By Harriet Fleuriot

On Tuesday my hosting skills (and general knowledge/experience/enthusiasm for the digital advertising world) were called upon, to welcome the filmmakers and introduce for the She Says: Meet the Advertisers event.

But beforehand I wanted to get in on the action at Connecting Voices: Films from the Commonwealth and arrived at the ICA just in time to meet the two filmmakers who had travelled all the way from India and Trinidad & Tobago – Leena Manimekalai and Camille Selvon Abrahams (respectively) – for the screening of their films. They were both super lovely and an exciting highlight was meeting Camille’s friend and filmmaker Horace Ové, who holds the Guinness World Record for the first Black British film-maker to direct a feature-length film Pressure.

So, then off to She Says: Meet The Advertisers…

…and to my delight, I had met one of the filmmakers already through friends and added bonus – she shares my fabulous name - Harriet Jordan-Welch from Unit 10 Productions. I also had heard of Christiana Miranda, mainly her success story – she had worked as a receptionist at a production company, was asked to have a go shooting a massive-budget car ad in America for their client, did such an amazing job she did more and is no longer a receptionist… A dream story if you ever heard one! The third filmmaker was Erica Herbert who also had some impressive work to show and was very thrilled to be there and show her work.

And of course She Says were there to host, and were completely brilliant and friendly and totally on the ball.

I chatted to Unit 10 Productions afterwards, and the result is the video below. We touched on a question that had been raised about whether women directors in advertising have some sort of higher responsibilty, understanding or awareness towards the sexualisation of women represented in ads, and seeing as time ran out on the actual day, I’d like to open this debate up for commenting below, because personally I’d love to hear everyone else’s opinions on this!