The voice of Maria M. echoes the historical impingements on womanhood: that a woman’s greatest value is her silence is at least as old as Sophocles and holds just as much value elsewhere as it does for southern Italians. Against the law of “omertà”, which rendered no protagonists willing to be filmed for the initial purpose of a documentary, Gertrud Pinkus crafts an ingenious storytelling method where a southern Italian migrant family to Germany enacts Maria’s oral telling of her own life as a migrant, while maintaining her anonymity.
Decades later, Silvia Biagioni reminds us that the strains of womanhood are atemporally incessant across both past and present-day Europe. Battlefield concludes with a poem borrowed from Collettivo Femminista di Cinema’s 1971 film, L’aggettivo donna. The unknown poetessa writes: ”I am the one people talk about, but I have no voice … I am the one with no language”. Together with composer Andrea Laudante, Biagioni re-appropriates archival materials which highlight the 1960s and 1970s feminist movement in Italy, while bearing dissonance to the same timeline in which Maria M. was raising her family.
The symbolic breadth of showing these films together petitions multiple stages of reflection. Maria’s life seems untouched by the activist efforts of her co-nationals and we may agree that is still so for many women today. While ethos and grievance may render others to pass judgement on Maria’s life choices upon seeing the vivacious strife of other women at the time, the purpose of the program is not to evaluate her possible shortcomings, but to rethink a feminist essence. The double bill aspires to the idea that feminism, precisely as the allyship between women, could be a lifestyle. That, to some, what feels like a banal, apolitical act may in fact hold more political resonance than a public protest, just as was the case for Maria and her co-worker, who later becomes a friend.
Calup propus de Gabriela Cardoș, Monica Dănilă și Andreea Chiper pentru Her Docs, Varșovia. Proiect dezvoltat în Rezidența F-SIDES Wildcards 2026 – un program de formare dedicat curatoriatului de film, conceput ca un laborator de idei în care participanții își dezvoltă propriile concepte curatoriale în dialog cu profesioniști din industrie și cu rețele internaționale de cinema.
