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Articles by Heidi Atkins
What was the Women’s Handbook?
Images from the SU Archives “Did you know there used to be a Women’s Handbook?” I’ve been asking all of my friends this for the last few months, and everyone has said no. I’d heard about it during an interview, and been told it was a book the SU published to help women when they came to Cambridge, that they would stick it in your pidge on your first day here. But online, there is no record. I expected a few funny cartoons and some writing on supervisors that perhaps ran for half a decade at most.
Gender Agenda on building feminist solidarity in Cambridge
Heidi Atkins speaks to Gender Agenda zine officers Madeleine Baber and Elise Batchelor to discuss their revival of the zine and the difficulty of building a feminist space in Cambridge Stuck to the back of a door the women’s toilet of a Cambridge pub was a small sticker advertising ‘Cambridge’s feminist publication’, Gender Agenda.
Hot or not: Tiktok, hanging out, flatcest, and rowing
Varsity is the independent newspaper for the University of Cambridge, established in its current form in 1947. In order to maintain our editorial independence, our print newspaper and news website receives no funding from the University of Cambridge or its constituent Colleges. We are therefore almost entirely reliant on advertising for funding and we expect to have a tough few months and years ahead.
Nutrients | Free Full-Text | How Can We Find Out What Indigenous Children and Their Families Need to Manage Weight? Lessons from Formative Nutrition Intervention Research with First Australians
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Hacker T. Dog and ‘the flukiest job in showbusiness’
Heidi Atkins sits down with Phil Fletcher, the puppet master behind Britain’s favourite dog Hacker T. Dog needs no introduction. He’s the dog who graced our sscreens on CBBC daily, the animal behind “we’re just innocent men”, a champion of Sue Barker, meat paste and milky brews. Mr. T. Dog was an enormous part of most of our childhoods, but the man who has been under the desk, animating the dog the whole time, is a bit of an unsung hero.
What to watch this week
Dream Scenario (in cinemas) – 4 STARS A Being John Malkovich for the age of TikTok, this dark comedy stars Nicolas Cage as a hapless university professor who suddenly becomes an overnight sensation when millions of strangers start seeing him in their dreams. It’s difficult to tell whether this eventually ends up completely exhausting its concept or just isn’t quite brave enough to take it to its boldest conclusion.
Sertraline, side-effects, and the Simpsons
A box of Sertraline, an antidepressant, tabletsHeidi Atkins for Varsity A lot of my life was spent thinking of depression as a big, gross, muddy swamp. It was a disgusting pool that I knew I could get out of but it was so warm, so grotesquely familiar, and would take so much energy to wade through that I resolved to stay entirely still and hope I wouldn’t sink any further. Occasionally someone would float the idea of an antidepressant rope to help pull me out.
‘Humanising Cambridge’ through the camera
Heidi Atkins talks to Tirza Sey about her upcoming documentary Cam Uncut and its mission to shine a light on all parts of life in Cambridge For most people entering the final year of their degree, the thought of adding any extra work onto the already intense workload sounds horrific.
Meet the CUFA presidents
Ever wanted to make a movie? These two can help. Meet CUFA co-presidents and power couple Josh Nathan and Katie Burge 1) What’s a movie everyone should see before they die? Katie: Frances Ha. Josh: Fanny and Alexander. 2) What’s your least favourite movie? Katie: I watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and it was just too much time travel and Pythagoras randomly appears and it just didn’t make sense.
On the phone with Blackberry
It’s easy to strip what Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol do to its bare bones: they make movies with their friends. Their editors, their producers, and almost all of their actors are close friends from film school or childhood. “There’s a very small group of friends who for the very first few months of this movie were just rallying behind Matt’s idea,” musician Jay McCarrol tells me.
Barbie and being like the other girls
To start off my review – a confession. I am deeply embarrassed to say that for all of my childhood I suffered from an illness known to many of us as not-like-other-girls-syndrome. My earliest memories of myself are swaddled with a sort of militant tom-boy-ism. If there was a tree, I was up in it; if there was a bug, I was going to pick it up; if there was a dead animal, you bet your bottom dollar I was going to get a stick and give that thing a poke.
Breaking the spiking taboo
“What are you here for?”, a nurse in Adenbrooke’s A&E asked me as she fastened a blood pressure monitor around my arm. It’s not the sort of question that’s particularly nice to answer, especially in a waiting room full of people with bleeding skulls and broken ankles. “I think I was spiked last night.” I managed to reply. I’d been saying that sentence all day, since I woke up and had to explain to my parents why I had ended up in their home, nearly 40 miles away from the Cambridge club I’d left.
Gazing With Open Eyes at Succession
“Nobody is ever missing”. So ends John Berryman’s Dream Song 29, an elegiac poem from over 50 years ago that has found new contemporary life with Jesse Armstrong’s brilliant Succession, its lyrics forming the titles of each season finale episode. But, of course, something is very much missing from our lives now – after four celebrated series, the best show on television about the worst people on television has finally come to an end.
Vulture’s May Week Watchlist
Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) is the perfect antidote to May Week madness. This tender and understated rendering of young-love-found-abroad is a filmic deep breath sure to slow you down, all while fuelling you up with enough wistful yearning for a whole summer of maladaptive daydreaming (though do bear in mind it’s unlikely every stranger you encounter on holiday will be as charming as Ethan Hawke or Julie Delpy…).
Feast your eyes on Thesis Submission
Tick, tick, tick… “SHIT”. Thesis Submission opens with that all too familiar terror that takes over you when you’ve missed a deadline. It’s a feeling that never really lets up for the rest of the film, which follows PhD candidate Harriet, as she desperately claws back against the march of time that seems to be endlessly pulling in deadlines. We see her as she argues with her miserable supervisor, a figure we sadly all know too well.
Inside A Crack in the Mountain
A Crack in the Mountain directed by Alastair Evans About 10 minutes into the documentary A Crack in the Mountain, the camera cuts to a shot of Vietnam’s Sơn Ɖoòng caves. Light streams in from a hole in the roof, a person walks up to it on a rock that pokes above the water. Seeing the shot in motion as the camera draws back, cutting between different angles as the person walks toward the light is nothing if not breathtaking.
The beauty of girlhood in Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret
Are you there, God? It’s me, Heidi. It seems a bit cruel of you to release this film as I teeter on the brink of (real) adulthood, a film based on the book I read when I teetered on the brink of (real) teenage life. When I first read the book, anticipating the release of hormones that would transform me completely, I started a diary that began with the sentence I used to open this article.
How to… film the existential horror of climate anxiety
There’s something truly endearing about How to Blow Up a Pipeline. The script borders on cringe-worthy at times, the actors have virtually no chemistry with one another, and the plot takes ‘political film’ to its utmost extreme. When I think about it with my analytical student-journo-brain I feel a compulsion to play the scathing reviewer: “It forgets it’s a film and becomes a political manifesto instead”, “The characters don’t mesh”, “It’s not well thought out”.
Cocaine Bear is embarrassed of itself
It would be easy to write a review about Cocaine Bear that comes to little more than “wow, this film is wacky!” That’s certainly what the marketing team wanted people to think, and the fact that the whole film rests on a conflict between a bear and a mob-boss does lend it to that sort of absurd reception. The problem is that, for how ridiculous the premise is, Cocaine Bear is actually quite boring. It is loosely based on the true story of a bear who ate a lot of cocaine.
Student filmmaker Frankie Browne on his short horror film ‘Midnight Feast’
With both parents in the film industry, Caius fresher Frankie Browne is a self-confessed ‘nepo-baby’. As of late, this has become quite the insult online, but for Frankie, all that this status has given him is some pointers in editing, a (again self-professed) great taste in films, a signed Under the Skin poster, and an admirable drive to make movies. It’s safe to say that Frankie is no Lily-Rose Depp.
Women Talking talks down to its audiences
I felt conflicted when I left the cinema after watching Women Talking. For the most part I enjoyed it, and I’m with it all the way when it pretty much yells “F*ck the Patriarchy!” But, despite my political agreement, it left me annoyed. The problem is that Sarah Polley, the feature’s director, is hell-bent on over-explaining the film’s message, shredding any remnants of artistic artifice that separates a film from a political thesis.
Celebrating LGBTQ+ History through Cinema this February
It’s LGBTQ+ history month, and while I’d love to celebrate with a fun flick about queer culture, the film industry is a little bit obsessed with packaging any movies on the topic into a neat box of sheer misery. This is a well documented Hollywood habit that breeds a problem for the community. When all that’s put on the big screen is movies about how miserable it is to be gay, coming out becomes a daunting task.
Why Best International Film is patronising
Heidi Atkins discusses why condensing all non-English language films into one award insults international filmmakers If you’ve seen Fleabag, you’ll be familiar with the scene in which Kirsten Scott Thomas talks about her character’s “Best Woman in Business” award: “it’s infantilising bollocks!” she says; “a subsection of success”. She’s separated from her peers by her gender regardless of her competitive merit.
Wednesday: What’s happened to Tim Burton?
With images and clips from the show covering the internet, and 5.8 billion minutes watched in just its first week (that’s just over eleven thousand years!), Wednesday became an instant hit. The show follows The Addams Family daughter as she enters a new school, Nevermore Academy. Here she develops psychic abilities, experiences paranormal attacks, and dedicates herself to solving a mystery. Wednesday is inoffensive and fun. I stormed through it in just three days.
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