Cinema of Feminist Resistance

curated by Margot Mecca, Festival dei Popoli

Our research into documentary cinema created by women in Italy has led us to (re)discover a body of filmmaking—particularly from the 1960s and 1970s—that was profoundly political and militant, using the moving image as a gesture of struggle and denunciation, as a tool for emancipation embedded within a collective discourse. This mode of filmmaking was deeply linked to a technological paradigm shift, thanks to the arrival of filming devices that enabled a new, direct, embodied, and participatory relationship with reality. A mode of production that becomes part of the work itself: films born from the experiences of feminist collectives, television reportage that broke with convention, works tied to theatrical and artistic avant-gardes, and protest films emerging from within political movements and activism.

Essere Donne by Cecilia Mangini and Marisa della Magliana by Maricla Boggio ideally represent this diverse field of cinematic creation. On one hand, Mangini, one of Italy’s leading documentary filmmakers, delivers a militant, rigorous, and unflinching film about the condition of women in Italy and the struggles agitating working-class women. On the other, Boggio, a playwright, invents a deeply feminist television device: the everyday portrait (the personal is political) of a woman capable of achieving emancipation through collective commitment.

Two films that ideally encapsulate an era of experimentation, research, and cross-pollination between artistic practices and militancy. A widespread creative ferment that found in cinema a field for both creation and emancipation.