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Feminist Film Manifestos

Feminist Film Manifestos III

International Women’s Film Festival at the CCCB

Audiovisuals

Free

The programme brings together films from different periods to give an overview of the representation of women’s work, using different approaches in a breakaway from the scant attention given to women’s activity in the visual tradition.

This breakaway has allowed the emergence of unexpected ideas that now enable us to make revealing interpretations of the political import of the prejudices and omissions of patriarchal culture as regards the role of women in economy, sustainability and work. Feminist practices in the field of cinematographic creation represent an inspiring contribution to the construction of new interpretations and new narratives that are closer to the real, multiple, diverse experience of women’s work in every field.

Friday 10 November

18:00

Soy cámara, Raquel Marques, María Romero, Zoraida Roselló and María Zafra, Spain, 2017. 20' Premiere. With the presence of the directors.

A reflection on women in their places of work. In these places, the boundaries between work and life, independence and caring, often presented as real, are revealed as fictional, constituting the feminisation of precariousness. This video sets out to visibilise things that are not normally seen with a view to questioning the ways in which class, gender, and origin, but also the processes of globalisation, reproduce a system that conceals life under the guise of productivity and efficiency.

Through the glass ceiling, Leeds Animation Workshop, Great Britain, 1994. 17'.

Working class women provide the leitmotiv of this animation that dissects the specific working conditions faced by women in precarious jobs assigned to them in nineties’ Britain. These conditions involve racism, sexual abuse, weakened positions within the family, due partly to wage discrimination, and, in short, an inexcusable social disregard. Using the narrative structure of a fairy tale, the film presents strategies to overcome these pitfalls, driven by activism and a profound desire to educate. A key work for understanding the response that took place during the grey years of Thatcherism.

Performing the border, Ursula Biemann, Switzerland, 1999. 43'.

A video essay set in Ciudad Juárez (Mexico-US border) about the mark that the border makes on the territory and on the people who live there. Biemann observes the border as both a physical and a discursive place that generates ideas about the sexualisation of the space and the division of labour by gender, prostitution, the representation of female desire in the entertainment industry, and sexual violence in the public sphere. This area, where women are employed in factory conditions of semi-slavery, where no labour rights are respected, is represented by a combination of interviews, scenes and sounds recorded on site, and found footage that offers a revealing image of the gendered conditions created by the cruel impact of globalisation and free-trade treaties with the USA.

20:00

The life and times of Rosie the Riveter, Connie Field, USA, 1980. 65'

This film exposes the US Government’s opportunism with its construction of the propaganda operation surrounding the figure of the icon, Rosie the Riveter. The aim was to mobilise women to sign up “graciously” and “with no specific demands” for the jobs left unattended when US troops left for Europe during World War II. The huge response to the call of Rosie the Riveter did not mean that the experience was satisfactory, taking into account, as the film shows in the experiences of various women, the fact that the same operation and the same demagogy were used to demobilise them the moment the soldiers returned home in 1945. The film is the result of a process of rereading, reediting and resignifying propaganda documents that are compared and contrasted with the real experience of the women involved, to offer enlightening information about the role of images in the construction of imaginaries and conventions.

Sunday 12 November,  18:00

Sois belle et tais-toi!, Delphine Seyrig, France, 1981. 115'.

Delphine Seyrig, actress, director and militant feminist, interviews French and American actresses about being a woman in the audiovisual world. With questions like “Would you have chosen the same profession if you’d been born a man?”, “Is there a place for actresses when they’re not young any more?” and “Have you ever dreamed of becoming a director?”, Seyrig dissects the profession and offers a portrait of some of the forms of violence inflicted on women.

With the presentation of CIMA and the presence of actresses and filmmakers.

This activity is part of Feminist Film Manifestos

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