The Intentions

     We, the Nel Nome della Donna Trust and the women coordinating the International Independent Women’s Film Contest and Itinerant Festival, are motivated to favour and support the independent work of women directors and provide a wide avenue for the circulation of their work. Therefore, we are combining with the Contest a travelling presentation: not an event covering a couple of days at an official place like a theatre, but rather an Itinerant Festival developing in women’s places.

   Our desire is to travel the road carved by the women’s movement: i.e. the absence of a traditional organization, replaced by a thick network of relationships among informal groups, not bound in hierarchical structures, and fed by the practice of “autocoscienza”, always experienced in political relationship with other women.

   We support and encourage feminine freedom without ideological rigidity. Nevertheless, we have some convictions to share with the women directors, the supporters in preparation and development of the Itinerant Festival, and the women spectators who will form the juries. Throughout the process, we respectfully request an awareness of our convictions, by the directors while developing their works, the women organizers for standardizing the methods of the Contest’s diffusion and the Festival’s preparation: and by the juries while homogenizing the criteria for the films’ evaluation.

   We want to work more with a sense of heart and soul (ours, and other women’s) than of the standard cinematographic rules and techniques; to promote the exploration of meaning more than efficiency; to encourage relationships more than mass-communications; to organize the Festival’s progress always remaining firm to the living mediation of each of us and of our relationships. We favour a search of feminine freedom that promotes autonomous subjectivities, more than conforming with external agents searching for notoriety and/or profit .

   The risks, the conflicts, and the results of women’s relationships demonstrate many connections of feminine freedom involving all dimensions of social and political reality.

   We are persuaded that one avenue of the experience of feminine freedom is through visual research, if this research is nourished by the history of women, i.e. when it is not only an aesthetic, even if aesthetic is interesting, but concerned with recognizing the meaning of feminine difference and presence, in the here and now, in the past and in the imaginary.

   We challenge the women directors to grasp the multiplicity in feminine existences, esteeming it and heeding it. To attentively photograph it, so that images illuminate this freedom, and to reveal histories, details, fortunes, lifestyles, and interpretations, that otherwise would be without testimony and representation.

   Therefore, the freedom of artistic expression of the director, shall be reason of merit for the work. In addition, the presence of entirely feminine troupes shall also be reason of merit, because we believe that a women’s troupe promotes feminine relationships in a collective job like cinema. But above all, because in this way, feminine authority asserts its point of view.

   We remind women directors that prizes are sharable among the contributors to the success of a film.

   We want the jury formed by women spectators only. We recognize that there are locations of showings also frequented by men, in the practice of diverse relationship, and obviously men will attend showings; however, we entrust to women the judgment and the choice in the selection of awarded films.

   We hope that the Itinerant Festival, an absolute novelty, will be a period of amusement, emotion, meeting and, above all, an exchange of feminine freedom.

   The best to all of us!

Milli Toja, Giovanna Foglia,

Donatella Massara, Fiorella Cagnoni

Bureau info@nelnomedelladonna.org

Milli Toja milli.toja@fastwebnet.org

Donatella Massara donatella.massara@fastwebnet.it

Giovanna Foglia & Fiorella Cagnoni fiorefoglia@alice.it

       THE FESTIVAL'S FILMS