Female gaze
All the films in the Diamonds Are Forever section curated by Alina Marazzi for the 63rd Festival dei Popoli
In composing the program, which offers women's looks ranging from the 1970s to our present, the intention was to go in search of forgotten films, often unique works in the journey of their authors.
This is the case with Gertrud Pinkus's surprising The Value of a Woman is Her Silence and Manuela Serra's O movimento das coisas, both documentaries from the 1980s rarely shown to the public: two films that respectively recount the experience of Italian emigration to Germany and that of peasant life in Portugal through the eyes of female protagonists in search of redemption and emancipation.
Sentimental autonomy and economic independence are at the heart of the love story in De cierta manera, Sara Gomez's only feature film: the Cuban director questions the legacy of a racist and macho colonial society by interweaving investigative cinema, ethnographic observation and political cinema.
Others are titles by directors recognized in the feminist film scene, such as Joyce Chopra who, in direct cinema style, with Joyce at 34 offers an autobiographical portrait that interrogates the never resolved dilemma of choosing between motherhood and profession, and Agnes Varda who, with her usual intelligence and delicacy, in Les glaneurs et la glaneuse takes us on an unprecedented peregrination that interrogates questions of form and content fundamental to a certain feminist film methodology by privileging informal and fragmentary materials, often the only remaining traces of women's daily lives.
Varda's film provides a perfect gateway to Marjorie Keller's Daughters of Chaos and Su Friedrich's Sink or Swim, both experimental films that focus on the age of adolescence using small-format film and found footage. Finally, in The Super8 Years, Super8 is again the medium with which writer Annie Ernaux retrieves her image of the past, blurred and sometimes at the edges of the frame, to put it at the center of a self-narrative centered on her own narrative voice. (Alina Marazzi)
Initiative carried out as part of the "Project for the cataloging, digitization and valorization of the Festival dei Popoli and Mediateca Toscana archives," in collaboration with Fondazione Sistema Toscana, with the contribution of the Region of Tuscany and the Soprintendenza Archivistica e Bibliografica della Toscana.
