Essere donne | A proposito de la mujer

Essere donne (Being Women)

D: Cecilia Mangini, Italy 1965, 29 min, Italian OV with English subtitles

As idealized representations of feminine glamour and luxury fill the screen, the male narrator of Essere donne asks, “Who can recognize themselves in these images?” Cecilia Mangini’s film is devoted to those who cannot: the six million women working in Italian factories, some of them still teenagers, and those who toil, as the narrator puts it, “in the bondage of domestic chores.” Essere donne was commissioned by the Unione donne italiane, a women’s organization tied to the Italian Communist Party. Departing from the conventional representation of the proletarian subject as a male factory worker, the film explores the condition of working-class women during Italy’s so-called economic miracle, addressing the prevalence of northward migration and the difficulties of juggling wage labor and responsibilities within the home.

A proposito de la mujer (About the Woman)

D: Kitico Moreno, Costa Rica 1975, 40 min, Spanish OV with English subtitles

Kitico Moreno was the first director of the Departamento de Cine, a national film institute in Costa Rica founded in 1973 and which became the Centro Costarricense de Producción Cinematografica in 1977. In 1975, responding to the United Nations’ declaration of the International Women’s Year, Moreno made A proposito de la mujer, a film that braids together realist testimonies by Costa Rican women from disparate sectors of society with experimental, expressionist sequences so as to offer a multifaceted representation of gender relations in the country. The expressionist sequences, shot in high contrast black-and-white, give symbolic form to women’s feelings of entrapment and subjugation, dramatizing their desperate yearning for emancipation.