Programme 1

Gently Down the Stream
Su Friedrich, 1981, 13 min.

Hide and Seek
Su Friedrich, 1996, 65 min.

Gently Down the Stream, one of Su Friedrich’s early works and one of the most experimental, is built around a set of dreams revealing a conflict between her Catholic education and her lesbian desires. The texts are scratched directly on to the film’s emulsion, while the images are linked together tangentially, thereby evoking the state of bewilderment and dislocation characteristic of dreams.

Hide and Seek looks at a similar topic to the previous film, although here using documentary tools — a set of interviews with adult lesbians talking about their puberty — and fiction — the story of Lou, a girl who discovers her sexual preferences in the 1960s. The film was inspired by tee-shirts adorned with the phrase ‘I was a lesbian child’ worn during the protests by Lesbian Avengers activists, a group working for lesbian visibility which Su joined. When she saw the slogan, she realised that probably nobody had addressed this issue before in the cinema.

Gloria Vilches