Student BAFTA nomination for 'The Female Voice'

An alumnus of Goldsmiths, University of London has been nominated to win one of four top prizes at the Los Angeles BAFTA Student Film Awards.

Julia dos Santos, who graduated with a BA in Media & Communications last June, has been recognised for the Student Film Award for Documentary for ‘The Female Voice’.

The film uses contemporary and archive footage compiled at Goldsmiths to illustrate the suppression of female voices in the media and society as a whole.

It features on a shortlist of three taken from 117 submitted documentaries. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in Los Angeles on 22 June.

Following the recent international expansion of the Awards, this year’s shortlisted 45 films have been selected from over 400 submissions by students at film schools in 15 countries ranging from Argentina to China, Lebanon to the UK.

Should it win, it will be the film’s second success of the year, having already won a craft award to recognise exceptional editing at the Royal Television Society Student Awards in February.

The documentary had also been nominated in the ‘Best Factual’ category at the same ceremony.

Most recently, in April, it was awarded a special commendation at the British Universities Film and Video Council’s ‘Learning on Screen Awards’, where judges praised the documentary for being ‘broadcast quality’. 

Dos Santos, who produced the film alongside fellow students Minji Kim and Jeanette Lee, said: “It’s surreal to think that people at BAFTA have even seen my film, let alone shortlisted it. The film is about empowering women to make their voices heard, and as a young female filmmaker, I’m ecstatic to see that people think our message is worth listening to. I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity and for the incredible people who made this film a reality. The plan is to follow the momentum we’ve picked up, and see where else we can go with it.”