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From 2024 to 2026, Calliope Arts Foundation and the Festival dei Popoli Institute are launching a collaborative project ‘Women Trailblazers in Documentary Cinema’, aimed at rediscovering and celebrating women filmmakers, whose work has been undervalued or forgotten over the years. Over the course of several editions, thanks to the support of Calliope Arts Foundation, the ‘Festival dei Popoli’ International Documentary Film Festival – will present tributes dedicated to female filmmakers neglected by the historiography of the art of cinema. This initiative offers the public the opportunity to appreciate the work of true trailblazers, who have remained in the shadows of their era.
The collaborative project with Calliope Arts Foundation foresees the development of thematic pathways, whose aim is to foster a process of rediscovery of women’s cinema, involving its artistic production as a whole, whilst spotlighting the movements, personalities and figures that deserve to be brought to light, including those who have not yet received due attention. This project strives to contribute to the reformulation of an important sector in the history of cinema which, until now, has been overlooked and is frequently one-sided, even as far as documentary films are concerned.
The 2024 Edition of Women Trailblazers in Documentary Cinema will bring one of Europe’s most important female directors to Florence. In early November 2024, Judit Elek will meet the public during a masterclass and to present her films, in their newly restored versions from the Film Archive of the National Film Institute of Hungary. Elek’s work chronicles her country’s stories throughout the course of the second half of the 20th century, from the Holocaust to the Cold War, from life under the Soviet regime to the cultural and social upheaval of 1968.
Judit Elek was born in Budapest in 1937. As a child, she survived the Holocaust and the war in a ghetto. At the age of 18, she took part in the 1956 uprising in Budapest, and in 1968, she was in Paris at the time of the country’s student protests – all historical events that proved instrumental in shaping her artistic path. In 1961, Elek graduated from the Academy of Dramatic Art and Cinematography, as part of a group that later formed the core of the Balázs Béla Studio, an experimental workshop comprised of young creatives, in line with the trends of the European New Wave. Judit Elek's early works are lyrical studies of solitude, in which she portrayed the spontaneity of direct cinema, transforming it into ‘poetry in motion’.
Encounter (1963) was the first Hungarian direct-cinema film, with no leading actors and improvised dialogue. Inhabitants of Castles (1966) and the two-part film How Long Does a Man Live? (1967) are documentaries in which the director follows and depicts a social portrait of human life in its entirety, juxtaposing the fate of the lonely ageing worker on the threshold of retirement with that of the young apprentice poised to replace him (presented at Cannes in 1968, the film won the Grand Prix at Oberhausen and the Jury Prize at Locarno).
Elek’s later films, the documentaries A Hungarian Village (1972) and A Commonplace Story (1975), were made over the course of five years in a mining village. They explore the fate and relationships of two girls who dream of escape, presenting an articulate psychological reportage featuring the rural Hungary of ‘socialism in the making’. She studies the harsh state in which its peasants live, as they are reduced to proletarians, and focuses on the intricate system of prejudice with which they are confronted. The filmmaker then inaugurated her ‘Jewish period’ with Memories of River, made between 1987 and 1989, based on documents pertaining to the infamous Tiszaeszlár blood-libel trial, when Jewish rafters were accused of the murder of a maid, who disappeared in 1882. The film won several awards in America and France and brought Elek into contact with Elie Wiesel, with whom she made the documentary To Speak the Unspeakable in 1997. This seminal work for Holocaust commemoration follows the life of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning writer, to Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
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