Go back to main page2023 Mexico City Symposium
Session 6 : "Sharing the Gaze: Female Collectives and the Archive" & Closing Remarks
Mexico, 18 April 2023
For centuries, women have been the object of contemplation. What happens when they are the ones observing? Groups of filmmakers around the world looked back, resisting being invisible through self-representation. A session that addresses the collective practice of naming oneself in the first person, facing inequalities from a perspective of an us whose legacy must be preserved.
Please do not publish or re-use in any way any of these documents without prior permission of the speakers.
The Rescue of Mexican Feminist Cinema: The Case of the Colectivo Cine Mujer
Alejandro Gracida Rodríguez has a doctorate in Modern and Contemporary History. He works as an archivist, attached to the Cataloging department of Filmoteca UNAM (Mexico). He has done research in the field of film studies, mainly on documentary film, film newscasts, and social representations. He is a founding member of the Documentary Research Network, ReDOC Investigación. He has collaborated with the Ibermemoria program in teaching the Workshop on Conservation and Preservation of Film Archives, for the Nicaraguan Cinematheque, and as a teacher in the Diploma in Preservation of the Heritage of Sound and Audiovisual Archives.
The Women From the Dutch Feminist Film Collective Cinemien: An Oral History Pilot Study
Gerdien Smite is Assistant to the Chief Curator at Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands). In this position, she worked on Eye’s Collection Policy for the last two editions (2018 and 2023). In addition, she is part of the Eye Academic team that programs and organises, amongst other things, the annual Eye International Conference and the public lecture series This is Film! Film Heritage in Practice. Previously, she worked at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the Dutch Cultural Media Fund. Thanks to a Museum Grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, she conducted an oral history pilot study in Eye on the feminist film collective Cinemien.
Girasolas, Women Behind and in Front of Cameras
Noelia Torres
Tracing the Archive of Franca Donda and the Venezuelan Film Collectives Cine Urgente and Grupo Feminista Miércoles
Lorena Cervera Ferrer is a documentalist, researcher and teacher. She holds a PhD from the University College London with a research project on documentary film made by Latin American women between 1975 and 1994 that was funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. She currently works as a Senior Lecturer at the Arts University Bournemouth Film School. Lorena has participated in conferences such as SCMS, Visible Evidence and LASA and has published in Alphaville scientific journals. Journal of Film and Screen Media, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, and Feminist Media Studies. In 2021 she co-organized the international conference Cozinhando images, weaving feminisms. Latin American Feminist Film and Visual Art Collectives, from which she has co-edited a section for Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, published in 2022. Lorena is also a documentary filmmaker and has directed Pilas (2019) and co-directed #PrecarityStory (2020) , both short films have been screened and awarded at international film festivals, such as ZagrebDox, Alcances and the Malaga Film Festival. She is currently developing her latest documentary, Processing Images from Caracas.
