The third of our Fairy GOFFmothers is Cerise Howard!

CERISE HOWARD is director of the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia (CaSFFA) and a film critic who speaks about cinema on Melbourne radio station 3RRR, both as a regular presenter for the film program Plato’s Cave and as a regular guest for Richard Watts’ Smart Arts. Her writing on film can be found in Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal and the Slovenian journal Kino, as well as at her blog A Little Lie Down.

Cerise was a juror at the Mezipatra Queer Film Festival in Prague and has participated in critics’ juries for the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) at the Fribourg International Film Festival in Switzerland, and most recently the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Bohemia in the Czech Republic. She has worked for a variety of film festivals and organisations over the years in a wide array of capacities, including as a “foreign correspondent” for the Czech animation festival AniFest, and as a committee member for both the Melbourne Cinémathèque and tilde, Melbourne’s Trans & Gender Diverse Film Festival.

Outside of film, she is a composer and rock bassist of many years’ standing, having performed in Rockstrip, Molasses, ilk, Dirty Nicola and the Spud Hussies, and The Purring Furmaids, among other queer feminist rock ’n roll ventures.

Cerise’s favourite girls on film are the pranksters Marie I (Jitka Cerhová) and Marie II (Ivana Karbanová) from the 1966 film Daisies (Sedmikrásky), a feminist classic directed by Věra Chytilová and a milestone of the Czech New Wave.

Radio, film festivals, rock ‘n’ roll…we think it’s pretty obvious that Cerise is a perfect fit for GOFF! We can’t wait to hear her speak in September.