Female Filmmakers in European Cinema and the Reusability of Research Data. Interview with Kerstin Herlt

In the early 2000s Kerstin Herlt was the project manager of the pioneering f_films project, which aimed to document the contributions of female filmmakers to European cinema. In this interview, she talks about the origins of the project and some of its challenges. While some of the project results were later added to the DFF database, others are only accessible via the project website, which is no longer updated and therefore somewhat hidden. Herlt reflects on the importance of enabling data exchange between different databases as the prerequisite for their reusabilityand discusses data categorization, particularly the implementation of gender classifications. The interview further explores the challenges of maintaining and expanding digital film repositories, the importance of data provenance, and the role of metadata for and in feminist film historiography. The interview is part of an interview series initiated on data practices, provenance, and categorizations in film history by the research group „Aesthetics of Access. Visualizing Research Data on Women in Film History“ (DAVIF) (2021–2025), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR). The goal of the research group is to explore data visualizations inorder to tell different stories differently. The DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut &Filmmuseum (DFF) is one of the film historiographical project partners, in addition to the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP), both of whom have provided their researchdata for data visualizations. The interview series: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17233942 The project website: https://uni-marburg.de/Q85oo