IT IS AT THIS POINT THAT THE NEED TO WRITE HISTORY ARISES

È a questo punto che nasce il bisogno di fare storia

Austria, Portugal| 2024 | 96 min | col.

Carla Lonzi, an art critic and a feminist, devoted her last years to the study of Les Précieuses, a 17th-century group of French proto-feminists, leaving the project incomplete. Developing a new approach to feminist historiography was a central element in the  research of Lonzi, and therefore of this film, which oscillates between fiction and reality, real and invented documents, while at the same time aspiring to be an archive of feminist art. Lonzi’s unfinished research is Contanze Ruhm’s point of departure in rethinking this journey from a contemporary point of view and highlighting specifically feminist experiences over a period of three centuries. What becomes immediately clear in the film is that time and memory mirror each other; they are fragments of a narrative of the oppression and violence to which women have constantly been submitted – a warning for the future. (l.f.)