The personal is political: a review of the intersections between feminism and documentary

Curated by Sophie Mayer and Elena Oroz, The personal is political is a film cycle based on two coordinates: historical development and transnational character. It thus invites us to a journey in time and space to review the visibility and the forgotten history of women, the subjectivities, the statements –personal and social, local and global–, and the devastating effects of patriarchal domination. Subjective experience, political zeal at the local and global levels, and the (re)writing of history are the key words and the threads that seam the programme together.

Each session will focus on specific topics to explore, based on the embryonic idea of early feminism that “the personal is political,” various geographical, political, and social contexts in search for connections and differences in what today we could call “global feminism(s).” While acknowledging the differences between women, the films selected not only pose a challenge to gender relations but also carry overlapping criticism to colonialism, capitalism, or compulsory heterosexuality. Likewise, the programme is intended to show how feminist documentary has always been in the avant-garde of the formal experience of contemporary film, beyond the genre itself, since the most radical innovations of documentary film in the past forty years would be impossible to understand without these movies.

The personal is political explores connections, variations, and echoes in forty years of feminist film from a decentralised point of view, showing documentaries by a series of women filmmakers who have been made visible in the twenty-first century –women whose short but promising careers have barely had an impact in Spain: Natalia Almada (Mexico), Akosua Adoma Owusu (US), Inge “Blackman” CampbellX (UK), or Rosalind Nashashibi (Egypt)–, as well as the work of classical feminist directors like Agnès Varda, Sara Gómez, Sally Potter, Ursula Biemann, Abigail Child, or Sadie Benning.