Direction: Manuela Vigorita, Flaminia Cardini
Author: Manuela Vigorita, Flaminia Cardini
Country: Italy
Year: 2010
Running time: 74’
Subject: it only takes two women to create a world. In Cagliari, Maria Giovanna and Mariolina created Ifold, a women’s training enterprise with more than one hundred employees and seven hundred project-based collaborators. In Verona, Barbara and Anastasia, inspired by the Catalan artist Marga Ximenes, are betting on the Esposta gallery, a place where female and male artists are invited to collaborate and co-habit a common space in a “doing that binds in relationship”.
Passions, desire, risk, and gamble are at the heart of the many stories told in the documentary. Holding them together is a thread of thoughts and practices that seem to say to every woman: “Go forth!”.
The story—a web of stories, experiences, and portraits—begins in Milan, where starting from the early 1960s, some women met in homes and sought a different path from the one traced by emancipationism.
They looked beyond equality and the recognition of denied rights. They were in search of a full and original sense of being women. They spoke among themselves about what a world that takes into account the difference of bodies, stories, and desires should be like. And they discovered that what is needed above all is a relationship with their peers to rediscover their own roots.
With The Politics of Desire, we follow the traces of this feminism that made homes its first meeting place and then moved into bookstores, libraries, universities, and documentation centers. That feminism that did not get bogged down in protest marches, did not exhaust its energy in grueling parliamentary debates, but entered the lives of many and produced changes in today’s reality.
It is “difference feminism” that is being recounted, a phenomenon considered in Europe and the United States as a “gem” of Italian culture.
It is primarily this long wave that The Politics of Desire tells of. Of the visible signs of a revolution that has transformed the world of work, the relationship between women and men, but also the conception of the economy and society.
The signs of slow, tenacious, embodied change are found everywhere, in large cities as well as in many small Italian towns, where you would not expect it, but you find a women’s bookstore, an association, or a documentation center that holds meetings and publishes journals.
There are many protagonists in this story made of personal stories that have the charm and magic of a lived partiality, whose memory is moving, whose words are pieces of life. Women who passionately dedicate themselves to seeking ways of a different way of being in the world and doing politics by putting everything on the line: thoughts, bodies, emotions.
What Eric Hobsbawm defined as “the only non-failed revolution of this century,” Luisa Muraro has lived through it all, with her political commitment, her passion for philosophy, and the texts she has written. In her latest book “At the Market of Happiness,” she calls on all of us to continue a work of love for life, for difference, for the world we inhabit. “What would our life be without great desires? Can one desire what seems impossible to obtain?” she asks. And she states: “The world is safe, precisely thanks to this condition.”
Type: Documentary
Format: DVD
Language: Italian
Notes: Source
Production: Libreria delle Donne di Milano, L’Altravista
Music: Francesca Pellegrini, Eleonora Graziosi, Enrico Goldoni, Chicco Di Mase, Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger, Giovanni Sollima
Editing: Alessandro Latrofa
Cinematography: Manuela Vigorita, Elena Ievolella
Sound: Antonio D’Andrea
Book edited by Clara Jourdan
“The Politics of Desire” was supported by:
European Union Media Programme
Trust – Nel Nome della Donna
Association for Women’s Studies “Maria Grazia Zerman”
Availability: the video is available at the Badaracco Foundation (shelf mark V Vig); it can be requested from the Libreria delle donne