Conversation with Jindřiška Bláhová, Czech film historian and leading film critic

Věra Chytilová’s 1966 modernist tour de force Daisies (Sedmikrásky) has been considered by Western feminists as a feminist manifesto. Despite the fact that Chytilová insisted that she was not a feminist. How feminist the film really is? How does it manifest the director’s creative energies and style, how the game is changed if we consider that it was a collaborative piece of two women and a man, and how does it relate – in terms of depiction of female agency and perennial topics – to her earlier and later films, namely The Ceiling, The Apple Game and Traps, Traps, Little Traps? A 30 minutes talk will be followed by Q&A.

Conversation with directors, performers and protagonists of films included in the Possible Utopias program: Arami Ullón, Mihaela Drăgan & Thirza Jean Cuthand (filmmakers) | Arhanghella, Raisa Mihai, Julio Elvisey Pisică & Bianca Varga (performers).
Co-curator of the program Mariam Agamyan will be present at the discussion as well.

Cinema has long been an unfavorable environment for transgender, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people. Indulging in the moral panics of the twentieth century, the films often broadcasted offensive stereotypes, dangerous for trans*gender people, while trans*gender people in the film industry were exploited and abused. The modern, of course Western-centric, film industry all too often uses representations of marginalized communities as a PR move and a way to earn social capital. Doing so, it leaves unnoticed the living experiences of the oppressed groups. During the discussion devoted to the "Origins and Echoes" film program, we want to talk with the film directors and the protagonists about the commonalities and differences in the experiences of the transgender, non-binary and gender-nonconforming people in different countries. We will also talk about the role that media and artistic representations play in the social processes, activism and the life of these communities.

The Radical Love programme was created as the Filma collective were looking for films that balance their artistic statements with their political stances. We have put a special focus on the cinema that is sensitive to the filmed subjects, where the directors reflect on their experiences and/or prefer the slow filmmaking defying the notions of commercial and symbolic success within the film industry. The concept of radical love has helped us combine such different films into a single programme without assigning a particular positionality to the directors and their films.