This year’s Porto/Post/Doc presents Another Story, a European programme revisiting the work of women filmmakers of the 20th century whose importance was sidelined or forgotten for decades. The initiative offers an encounter with other histories of documentary cinema, bringing to the fore works that challenge dominant narratives and explore new relationships between image, testimony and reality.
The programme brings together three films by Binka Zhelyazkova, Yvonne Scholten and Věra Chytilová. Despite their different contexts and cinematic languages, their work shares an attention to women’s experiences, to the relationship between intimate life and structures of power, and to the search for cinematic forms capable of making visible voices and experiences that have remained at the margins.
|
Binka Zhelyazkova Binka Zhelyazkova (1923–2011) was the first woman to direct a feature film in Bulgaria and one of the country’s most dissident cinematic voices. Censorship deeply marked her career: her first film was banned for decades, while several of her other works were prevented from circulating in Bulgaria. “Lullaby” Binka Zhelyazkova · BGR, 1981, DOC, 60’ In Sliven women’s prison, women who entered prison while pregnant and gave birth while serving their sentences tell their stories, while the film observes the corridors, cells and everyday life of the children born there. Zhelyazkova’s approach gradually moves closer to the women, giving space to their own words and experiences. Made in a documentary style close to cinéma vérité, “Lullaby” was banned in Bulgaria and would only be publicly screened after the political changes of 1989. |
|
Yvonne Scholten Yvonne Scholten (b. 1943) is a Dutch journalist, writer and documentary filmmaker. A correspondent in Italy during the 1970s, she made her only film in 1980, dedicated to the history of women’s resistance in Italy. “Donna: Women in Revolt” Yvonne Scholten · NLD, 1980, DOC, 66’ “Donna: Women in Revolt” begins with a fascist attack on Radio Donna, a feminist radio station in Rome, in 1979, and traces eight decades of women’s resistance in Italy. Through interviews and archival footage, Yvonne Scholten revisits struggles ranging from the fight for suffrage to women workers’ and peasants’ movements, antifascist resistance and second-wave feminism. |
|
Věra Chytilová A central figure of the Czech New Wave, Věra Chytilová (1929–2014) was the first woman to study and graduate in directing at FAMU in Prague. Her cinema, marked by visual experimentation and a critique of social conventions, repeatedly addressed questions of gender, power and autonomy. “The Ceiling” Věra Chytilová · CZE, 1961, FIC, 42’ A graduation film made at FAMU, “The Ceiling” combines a documentary-like approach with a fictional narrative. It follows a young model confronted with the choices she has made and the limitations of the life she has built, introducing one of the central questions of Chytilová’s cinema: women’s struggle to escape the roles and expectations imposed upon them. The Czech National Film Archive describes the film as centred on female emancipation. |
|
Another Story is the result of a two-year European collaboration between HER Docs, Poland; Festival dei Popoli, Italy; Doxumentale, Germany; Sofia DocuMental, Bulgaria; online magazine Cineuropa, Belgium; and Loreley Films, Switzerland, as guest curator. The project is a collective effort to reopen the history of cinema, recognise the legacy of pioneering women filmmakers and create space for new generations of filmmakers to find, in these images, other possibilities for telling the world. |
