The Camera Is Ours — an engrossing celebration of women documentarists

Late Scottish director John Grierson is often described as the father of British documentary. Less feted are two other film-makers who could rightly claim a place in the family tree: Grierson’s sisters, Marion and Ruby. Each created major work now featured in The Camera Is Ours, an engrossing collection of non-fiction by a neglected group of 20th-century British women.

Early career ends are a common thread. For Marion, marriage and motherhood led to retirement; Ruby was killed in 1940 filming wartime evacuees. For others, such as the great Kay Mander, the movie business simply proved too grindingly sexist. Yet the mood of the project is celebratory, led off by Marion Grierson’s Beside the Seaside (1935), a travelogue of inspired ambition, her camera fixed to fairground carousels and planes hugging the coast before a slo-mo panorama of Brighton prom, social melting pot. Trilbied figures dot the Palace Pier, three years before Graham Greene wrote Brighton Rock.

The films fascinate and multitask. An archive of female film-making and social history, the roles overlap in the focus on the lives of real women. At the start of the second world war, Ruby Grierson’s docudrama They Also Serve salutes housewives. Amid the rebuilding in 1945, Mander’s Homes for the People lets working women themselves describe how the weight of poor housing fell doubly hard on those for whom a three-room “muck-up” was both home and workplace.

But by 1967, the consumer boom promised “dream kitchens for dream women” in Sarah Erulkar’s Something Nice to Eat, a wonderfully groovy showcase of culinary adventure. A new British future seemed to have arrived — dished up with garlic and artichokes.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from June 3