You can’t judge a book by its cover, the old saying goes, but sometimes you can get close. That’s how I feel about the astronaut on the poster for this year’s Festival dei Popoli cinema festival. She’s a futurist being wearing vintage attire, with what looks like a 1960s camera strapped to her belt, through which she will see the fleeting world. The quasi-cosmic lady peering out from her spacesuit goggles and helmet is a documentarian and filmmaker, like the many women that will be descending upon Florence’s Cinema della Compagnia from November 2 to 10 because, this year, most of the directors who authored the 86 films forming part of this multifaceted programme are women.
The festival’s artistic director, Alessandro Stellino, sums up the event and its leading image. “More than half of the films scheduled for screening are by women, but we didn’t reach that stat based on any sort of quota. The truth is that the most beautiful and necessary films, out of the 1,500 we evaluated, happened to be by female directors. So, it’s fitting to have a female ‘explorer’ as the festival’s leading image. She is a visitor to a Florence that lies on the brink of the real and the unreal, and she’s from the future, yet her film equipment appears to be from the past. In the same way, these films are testimonies of both past and future, in their creators’ minds.”
A “veteran festival”
Speakers at the Festival dei Popoli press conference, including festival president Roberto Ferrari and managing director Claudia Maci, all talked about this year’s event with a touch of nostalgia. We are talking about the oldest festival of its kind in Europe, celebrating its 65th edition this year. Those “in the know” as far as Florence’s political history is concerned will be interested to hear that it debuted in 1959, with the blessing of three-time mayor Giorgio La Pira, who some Florentines call “il sindaco santo” (and whose post-mortem application for beatification—the second of three stages on the road to Catholic sainthood—will be confirmed once he produces an officially recognised miracle).
During this edition, most screenings will take place at via Cavour 50R, at Teatro della Compagnia, a well-known venue for documentary cinema year-round, and part of this year’s funding will thankfully go towards safeguarding the festival’s multi-decade cinematographic archive, another little-known treasure attesting to Florence’s ever-growing role as a hub of “contemporary” creativity.
A new section for “trailblazers”
For the full programme calendar and all screening times, visit www.festivaldeipopoli.org, but those who’d like to cut to the chase about this year’s highlights will set their sights on the festival’s newest section, Women Trailblazers and Documentary Cinema, sponsored by the Calliope Arts Foundation, with the intent of bringing lesser-known or emerging international artists into the limelight. French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop will premiere in Florence with her film Dahomey, which tracks the restitution of 26 stolen artworks from France back to the Republic of Benin. In five films, spread over ten days, we will see the works of iconic Hungarian filmmaker Judit Elek, whose masterful 60-year career captures the essence of “everyday life” in her home country, from its time as a Soviet-bloc nation to today. Through cinéma direct, she often produced films featuring non-actors and improvised dialogue, as in the case of the real-life cast of The Hungarian Village and A Commonplace Story. Both films produced in the mid-1970s, as a response to socialism, capture “ordinary life” and the depth of human relationships in a far-flung mining town, in what Elek calls, “this very draughty little gateway country”.
Stories of awareness
The Trailblazers project also supports the debut of a newly formed collective, Feminist Frames, which brings together five cutting-edge female directors, with their hand on the pulse of society, from Italy to Eastern Europe. It is at This Point that the Need to Write History Arises by Austrian director Constance Ruhm follows the trail of Italian feminist writer and thinker Carla Lonzi. In Woods that Sing, Croatian filmmaker Renata Poljak discusses the work of female partisans, through personal stories recounted, and Dutch filmmaker Sabine Groenewegen presents her 2024 film Remanence, chronicling an all-women peace movement that developed in the Netherlands in the 1930s before the onset of the Second World War.
In her courageous film Silence of Reason, Kumjana Novakova documents the violence and torture experienced by women imprisoned at the Foča rape camps during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “The only thing I did was to open archives that otherwise would not have been accessible, and I transposed those archives to the screen,” says Novakova, describing her account of women whose testimonies formed the basis of a ground-breaking trial that ended in 2007, before which rape was not considered a war crime.
In her documentary Cinegiornale 242 – Ferrovie del sole, Nika Autor relates the stories of women who built the Šamac-Sarajevo railroad in 1947. As a sampling of Autor’s quest, the film puts the following words to pictures: “They dig the earth, break the rocks. They permanently change the landscape and lives. The railway line built with bare hands, in seven months. Without any machinery, without any modern tricks.”
Cosmonauts or not, in their movies, these women tackle issues too large for a single film, or even a single lifetime. Yet, one thing is certain: the “trails they blaze” need exploring by all of us.
Women Filmmakers: Trailblazers
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The Curators’ Quaderno is a collection of notebook-style publications, conceived by Calliope Arts, in collaboration with The Florentine Press, to raise awareness of women’s contributions to the fields of art, science and culture.
Text language: English – 36 pages