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ph. Judit Elek
What is it like to be a French filmmaker documenting the return of stolen artwork and their journey from France back to the Republic of Benin? How does it feel to be the first French female oceanographer, on a cod angler’s ship sailing the Atlantic in 1952? What moved women partisans to action in the Balkans at the onset of the Second World War? International filmmakers Mati Diop, Louise Hèmon and Renata Poljak tell these stories in film, at the 65th Festival dei Popoli in Florence. These and many other women directors will feature as part of the festivals cultural programme ‘Women Trailblazers in Documentary Cinema’, sponsored by Calliope Arts, which aims to give women filmmakers and women’s stories greater coverage on the silver screen.
Mati Diop (1982) is a French filmmaker and actress working in France and Senegal. Her films explore exile and identity or memory and loss, using a combination of fiction and documentary devices. With Dahomey (2024), Diop became the first black filmmaker to win the Golden Bear at the Berlinale Film festival. At the core of the documentary film is France’s restitution of 26 artworks and artefacts to the Republic of Benin, including a wooden effigy of King Behanzin, 2 royal thrones and elaborately carved palace gates. The objects were looted by French colonial soldiers in 1892 and nearly 7,000 more plundered works are still found abroad.
Among the films screened expect Voyage de documentation de Anita Conti (Louise Hémon, 2024) on the first French female oceanographer who, in 1952, embarked on a trawler to share the challenging life of cod fishermen in the Atlantic, alone with her camera and sixty men for six months. She was also one of the first to warn against the exploitation of the seas and its resources. Other films included in the series are Remanence (Sabine Groenewegen, 2024) – a short film that combines two recently discovered archival sources to evoke a lost history of a Dutch women’s peace movement which brought together women in collective action in the 1930s – and Woods That Sing (Renata Poljak, 2024) built on the testimonies of female partisans from the Balkans during the Second World War.
The festival will feature films produced by members of the ‘Purple Meridians’ group. Women filmmakers from Turkey, Catalunya and Italy will be joined by participants from the Basque Country, Palestine, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Argentina, Belgium, Buryatia, Greece and Syria to discuss crucial issues like the experience of women filmmakers working in the context of war and conflict or who have lived in conflict zones before migrating, and what it means to make cinema with revolutionary potential.
One of the Festival’s highlights is the in-person presence of Hungarian filmmaker Judit Elek, who will host master classes inspired by her work spanning more than half a century. She has made taboo-crushing films that are ground-breaking in terms of theme and choice of form, whether present-day psychological vignettes, sociological reports or works serving to probe historical traumas.
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