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Feminist Film Manifestos

Feminist Film Manifestos IV

International Women’s Film Festival at the CCCB

Audiovisuals

Free

Feminist political disobedience starts with a laugh. This laugh is the first gesture that reveals the irreverence of women when faced with imposition. It is a radical dig at patriarchal authority. Humour and sarcasm are strategies that feminist cinematic narrative has incorporated to shape the disrepute linked to traditional devices of audiovisual representation. The set of films making up this programme show the efficacy and transcendence of this transgression.

Thursday 8 November, 2018 - 6.30 pm

- Soy Cámara - La carcajada de la Medusa, Marta Nieto and Marga Almirall, 2018, Spain, 20 min

What does the laughter of women bring into play? In a context of eminently phallocentric social, economic, and historical discourse, criticism by feminist films and cinema directed by women has been, and still is, a political tool for asserting another history of the world (and film), from a feminist perspective, one that is liberating, irreverent, funny, disobedient and, above all, with room for pleasure.

- Older Women and Love, Camille Billops and James Hatch, 1987, United States, 27 min

From various interviews and fictionalisations, Camille Billops and James Hatch constructed a film, brimming with radicalism and a sense of humour, about the attitudes often aroused by emotional and sexual relationships between older women and young men. The film-making couple, involved on both sides of the camera, employ a multiracial cast who make apparently candid declarations that are actually deeply subversive. Laughter challenging social mandates.

- History of the World According to a Lesbian, Barbara Hammer, 1988, United States, 17 min

From Plato’s Cave to post-punk, this film traces lines between diverse portrayals of women who love women, from prehistoric times to the contemporary world, with the sarcastic musical accompaniment of the lesbian quartet of the 50s Sluts from Hell.

Friday 9 November, 2018 - 6.30 pm

- The Gold Diggers, Sally Potter, 1983, Great Britain, 89 min

A representative film from the feminist cinema of the early 80s, both for its experimental structure and the radical approach of its content. Cerebral, Brechtian, and full of magnificently ironic sequences, this film was described by a British journalist as «a session of feminist torture». A black, female accountant who asks the powers-that-be too many questions about numbers and a beautiful blonde starlet, tired of being the belle of the ball, are cast in a film that questions the role of women as cinematic icons and searches for a new memoir for the heroines of celluloid.

Saturday 10 November, 2018 - 6.30 pm

- De stilte rond Christine M. (A Question of Silence), Marleen Gorris, 1982, Netherlands, 92 min

Marleen Gorris’s film debut instantly became a feminist classic. Three women, unknown to one another, are involved in a crime. During their trial and the corresponding psychiatric exams, the true roots of their crime are revealed. A film where there are no complacent smiles, but rather loud and irreverent laughter.

Digital projection, Spanish subtitles.

Sessions presented by the Festival programming team.

This activity is part of Feminist Film Manifestos

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Feminist Film Manifestos IV

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