If you give the decade some love handles either side, the 90s was a revolutionary time for Australian film: queer aesthetics were spotlighted, an exciting new generation of Indigenous film-makers hit the mainstream, and women were making edgy, experimental work, and feature films that competed – with great success in some cases – at Cannes.

But the decade also preceded dramatic technological transformation, meaning that many film-makers of the era no longer have playable copies of their films available.

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We’ve spent the past year curating an exhibition of films by women from this era – some of which have languished for decades in VHS or Beta format, while their playback platforms all but disappeared. For instance, a Beta version of acclaimed director Samantha Lang’s short film Out (1995) – a delightful work that came early in her career – was in the Australian Film ,Television and Radio School student film archive, but not even the film-maker had seen it in 20 years. Other films we found had not even made it as far as an archive, but remained in unplayable formats in personal storage.

For women film-makers the limitation of access to their work is particularly consequential: it compounds the institutional barriers that already serve to keep much work by women artists from serious institutional attention. Australian women’s film history risks being forgotten.

The 90s was a dynamic decade for Australian film culture more broadly. Film studies were seen as legitimate courses in both secondary and tertiary education. Video technology had kick-started the “democratisation of gear” and the immediacy of process, culminating in events such as the 48-Hour Film Project, a festival founded in the US in 2001 that quickly spread DIY short film culture internationally. In Australia there was a proliferation of short film festivals such as Tropfest, Flickerfest and St Kilda film festival, TV initiatives such as Eat Carpet, and commissioned series such as From Sand to Celluloid and Shifting Sands – a boon to experimental artists, and a great showcase for new work, including by many emerging women film-makers.

Short films were not simply considered a stepping-stone to feature making, but artefacts in their own right – and they were a perfect vehicle for exploring diverse voices and experimental techniques.

The classics of the period include Jackie Farkas’ Amelia Rose Towers (1993), a dazzling love-song to the “freaks” whose outsider status drives their creativity; Monica Pellizzari’s Just Desserts (1993) which intercuts a teenage girl’s sexual rites of passage with the cooking lessons of her Italian mother; and Alison McLean’s Kitchen Sink (1989), which, as the name playfully suggests, packs in just about every then-current feminist trope: Oedipal desire, abjection, recuperation of domestic space as a site of resistance, and much more.

Janet Merewether’s Cheap Blonde merges outrage, experimentation and a comic sensibility to deftly lampoon the film industry for its sexism, turning its own weapons — notably the pompous gravitas of the structural auteurs — against it. Cate Shortland’s Joy (2000) delivers an adrenaline-charged romp through speed ramping, freeze frames and scrolling text that literalise the social strictures of femininity from which Joy and her friends flee.

There were experimental documentaries too. In the self-reflective A True Story About Love, Korean-Australian film-maker Melissa Lee confronts her previously unchecked racial self-loathing. Ruth Cullen’s Painted Lady swings between slow pans of artist Vali Myers’ “outsider” drawings and paintings of female creativity, and the joyous free-flowing action around the artist’s open studio in Melbourne.

Tracey Moffatt’s Moodeitj Yorgas combines interviews, her signature lack of lip sync, and cheesy video FX to profile strong Indigenous women who succeed in the face of white violence.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘A classic film of whatever genre’: Small Treasures (1995) by Sarah Watt Photograph: Australian Screen

Meanwhile, women were challenging the paradigms of mainstream animation. They embraced the medium, renowned for its affinity with the hand-rendered and the imagination, to distance themselves from spectacle and conventional storytelling tropes and stereotypes.

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Antoinette Starkiewicz used line and movement mixed with levity and irony to deal with serious questions about sex in her considerable oeuvre, including Man and Zipper. Nicole Renee Phillips, a Bundjalung woman and Australia’s first Indigenous woman animator, made the landmark film Tuggan Tuggan (1997) as told by Oodgeroo Noonuccal. And Sarah Watt developed a powerful personal aesthetic language to make the audience feel in entirely new ways: starring the voice of Rachel Griffiths, Small Treasures remains a classic film of whatever genre, hard to surpass for its evocation of loss and resilience.

These are significant and award-winning films long unseen which played a crucial role in the development of Australian film. To forget them is to forget the insight, creativity and courage these film-makers brought to feminism and culture in Australia and beyond.

• Femflix, an exhibition revisiting the overlooked decade in Australian feminist film, is on at SCA Galleries at Sydney College of the Arts until 3 September