Strong Female Lead: An interview with director Tosca Looby

Adopting the archive-only approach of The Final Quarter, Looby and editor Rachel Grierson-Johns created a powerful and enraging one-off doc for SBS.
Strong Female Lead key art

โ€˜People are telling me they feel real rage when they see this film, and one reviewer said they wanted to throw something at the screen,โ€™ says director Tosca Looby on the phone to Screenhub. Sheโ€™s talking about Strong Female Lead, the feature documentary thatโ€™s causing waves even before its first broadcast on SBS this Sunday night.

โ€˜I think itโ€™s good that people feel rage,โ€™ says Looby. โ€˜That’s exactly what was intended. And then they should do something with that rage. If they’re a young woman and they’ve ever thought about going into politics, then they should do it!โ€™

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Rochelle Siemienowicz is a Melbourne writer and editor. Her first book Fallen, a memoir was published in 2014 and her second, Double Happiness, a novel, in 2024. She has a PhD in Australian cinema and was previously a journalist at ScreenHub and ArtsHub. ou can find her on Instagram: @Rochelle_Rochelle or at Substack where she writes a fortnightly newsletter, The Fool and the Queen.