Programme

Focus

Focus: Accomplices

For over 130 years, women have contributed to creating images for the cinema. Stories of self-empowerment lie at the heart of all important feminist movements. Cinema enables us as film-makers and audiences to show solidarity with people of yesteryear and perhaps even fall rapturously in love with them. In all decades – since the silent films of the 1910s – radical, anarchic heroines have inspired us, and we can connect with them as accomplices through time and across generations. Valuable clues into current feminist practices lurk in the archive.

We’ve gone for a bold concept with the Focus section: We’ve formed groups spanning various timeframes. We look for common links, friction points and feelings to make the experience of encountering other people a less solitary one. This time-crazy idea is inspired by Carolyn Dinshaw’snconcept of »Communities Across Time«. In »Getting Medieval«, the historian evokes queer communities in the late 14th century based on medieval texts, opening up for us and herself a desire across centuries where past and present touch.

Our programme invites you to interact with women accomplices across time. Cinema is such an ideal medium for this, as the audience and the characters on the screen can experience direct relationships while time axes can be turned all ways. We can mobilise greater energy for feminist causes when we know the achievements of different feminist positions outside our own radius.

Curators:

Filibus

Mario Roncoroni

IT
1915
Silent film
69’
OW

»Filibus’s trim suit and newsboy cap give gender boundaries a fairly forceful push […]; but still more radical is the […]

Indictment, revolt, rebellion. One Thousand Ways to Skin It reveals various styles of performance-based music videos as self-empowerment against entrenched […]

Lecture by Irit Neidhardt Tunis, 21 December 1922. One hundred years ago, the first film with an entirely Arab and […]

Semra Ertan

Cana Bilir-Meier

DE / AT
2013
Short film
7’
dt. OmeU

Semra Ertan left Turkey to join her parents in West Germany in 1972. She worked as a draughtswoman and interpreter, […]

From the depths of the EYE Filmmuseum archives, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi unearths some rarely seen highlights of female accomplicity from the […]

They have seen thousands of films and were asked to choose just one. Seven colleagues from three different generations explain […]

The Film All-Nighter of accomplicity with radical heroines and feminist artistic practices from 1907 to 2023. It all starts with […]

In March 2023, a very special workshop took place in cooperation with the SK Stiftung Kultur. Under the direction of […]