12th discussion organised by the IFFF Dortmund+Köln on gender equity and the status of women in the film industry on the occasion of the Berlin International Film Festival

Women have been working in front of and behind the camera since 1896, many have disappeared from film history. The film archive is essential for film festivals – it has the power to change the past, present and future of women’s cinema. However, a critical approach to the feminist archive is absolutely vital. How to deal with absence in the archive: with women, LGBTIQ+, People of Color? How do we frame historical films with sexist and racist images, scripts, ideologies? And in what way do we take responsibility for our own entanglements in unbalanced power relations, in particular when working in institutional and national archives? What role do accidental archivism and private collections play? How do we narrate the archive so that the past leads to us?

These critical questions will be discussed with a panel of international experts:

© Bozica Babic

Gaby Babić (Director Kinemathek Asta Nielsen)
Gaby Babić is the director of the Kinothek Asta Nielsen in Frankfurt am Main.Together with Karola Gramann and Heide Schlüpmann, she founded Remake. Frankfurt Women’s Film Days. She works as a programmer and cultural worker for various film festivals and cultural institutions and has been teaching and writing about her main fields of interest: film and history, critical theory, migration, Eastern European cinema, feminist film work, anti-racism and anti-fascism in film.

Jihan El-Tahri (Filmmaker, visual artist and producer)
Jihan El Tahri is a multi-award-winning documentary film director, writer, visual artist and producer. She has directed more than 15 films whileher visual art exhibitions have travelled to renowned museums and several Biennales around the world. El Tahri served as the General Director of the Berlin-based documentary institution DOX BOX. Her writings include essays and books such as Les Sept Vies de Yasser Arafat (Grasset) and Israel and the Arabs, The 50 Years War (Penguin). El Tahri served on a number of boards and several African film organisations including the Federation of Pan African Cinema and The Guild of African Filmmakers in the Diaspora.

Dr. Elisa Jochum (Department Head – Film Heritage, Deutsche Kinemathek)
Dr. Elisa Jochum is a film scholar and cultural historian. In 2022 Elisa was appointed Head of Film Heritage Department at the Deutsche Kinemathek. She holds a PhD from University College London, in which she combined film studies, postal history and spatial theory. During her postgraduate research, Elisa was a Visiting Assistant in Research at Yale University. Her teaching posts include Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, where she introduced a mandatory seminar on women in media history.

Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi (Curator Eye Filmmuseum)
Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi is the Curator of Silent Film at Eye Filmmuseum. Since 1999 she has been responsible for the discovery, restoration and presentation of many presumed lost films and helped to re-establish forgotten actresses such as Rosa Porten, Olive Thomas, Valeria Creti and Constance Talmadge. Rongen-Kaynakci is directly involved with the programs of international archival festivals, for instance Il Cinema Ritrovato, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto and other events dedicated to silent cinema. She has served on the steering committee of Women and Film History International from 2015 to 2022 and co-organised the 2019 Women and the Silent Screen Conference at Eye. She is also one of the three curators of the bluray-box ‚Cinema’s First Nasty Women which includes 99 films and has been released in 2022 by Kino Lorber.

© Julia Reschucha

Moderation: Dr. Maxa Zoller (Artistic Director IFFF Dortmund+Köln)
Dr. Maxa Zoller is the Artistic Director of IFFF Dortmund+Köln. Since her appointement in 2018 she has helped internationalise the festival programme and expanded its monthly output. The film archive has been part and parcel of Maxa’s academic work; her Ph.D. research on experimental film history at Birkbeck College, London gave her access to many European film archives; her curatorial work for Tate Modern, no.w.here, Art Basel and the EYE Filmmuseum always involved historical findings. In Dortmund she introduced the archival section IFFF packt aus and together with Betty Schiel she co-published Was Wir Filmten: Filme von ostdeutschen Regisseurinnen nach 1990 about the work of East German female filmmakers after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. In the future Maxa hopes to further foster and unfold the rich festival archive that hosts over 10.000 titels.

20th February | 4 p.m. – 7 p.m. | Vertretung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen beim Bund, Hiroshimastraße 12-16, 10785 Berlin

Participation is free.

The event will take place in English.

Registration required via: www.discussion.frauenfilmfest.com

The complete programme can be found here.

In cooperation with Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam
With support of Vertretung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen beim Bund and Film und Medienstiftung NRW