Panel discussion with Salomé Alexi, Pavla Frýdlová and Lana Gogoberidze, Host: Borjana Gaković
Whereas with Remake 1 the focus of our interest was on the Women’s Event of the Edinburgh IFF, in our second festival edition we turn our view to Eastern Europe. Here, women’s access to education and work was more of a given, though emancipation and equal rights didn’t necessarily follow. In the wake of perestroika, women filmmakers began to organise: In July 1987, more than 30 festival participants from 24 countries got together at the Moscow Film Festival and determined to establish an international organisation of film women. Lana Gogoberidse from Georgia and Márta Mézsáros from Hungary were voted presidents of the organisation, which in future was known as Kino Women International – KIWI. Its goals were the international exchange of information, closer cooperation among women in film and international distribution and co-production, as well as the organisation of film exhibitions. The collapse of the system and the very turbulent 1990s that followed in Eastern Europe resulted in the dissolution of KIWI, and its film programmes can only be reconstructed in fragments.
Topics for discussion are the conditions under which KIWI developed, the differences and solidarities between East and West feminists/filmmakers, the public response at the time and the difficult years of upheaval. We will also discuss the question of continuity in film women’s organisational structures today.
Born March 1 - 1966 in Tbilisi. After her studies at Tbilisi state Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Theatre Design and Painting, she works as set and costume designer on several feature and short films. 1992 enters FEMIS, Paris Film School. Directorial Department. Graduated in 1996 with Diploma of excellence and public presentation of her Diploma work.
Her short film FELICITA 2009 won a Special Jury Price at Venice Film Festival and Trieste Film Festival. 2014 her first feature LINE OF CREDIT was presented at Venice Film Festival’s official selection, Orizonti. It was awarded at Tbilisi Film Festival for best Directing and awarded with the Golden Linx - The Best Feature Film Award - At Fest New Directors New Films – Espinho-Portugal.
Salome Alexi translated from French in Georgian language Le plaisir de yeux of Francois Truffaut and Notes sur le Cinématographe of Robert Bresson. Edition Cezanne, 2016 and 2017. She worked as a producer and editor on Lana Gogoberidze’s last feature GOLDEN THREAD coming in 2020.
Pavla Frýdlová is a film director, screenwriter and published author. Up until 1990, she worked as a dramaturge and editor at Barrandov Studios in Prague. At the same time, she focussed actively on the areas of film theory and criticism, publishing her study “FrauenFilme in Osteuropa” with Trafoverlag in 1996 with funding from the Berlin Senate. She is co-founder of the Prague-based NGO Gender Studies, where she directed the international oral history project “Women´s Memory: Searching for Identity under Socialism” over the course of 12 years. She has released a series of publications, radio shows and documentary films on the basis of interviews conducted with women from different generations. Frýdlová is a recipient of the American Zirin Prize for her outstanding contributions to the field of women’s studies in Central and Eastern Europe.
Born on October 13, 1928 in Tbilisi, she had made 9 feature and 4 documentary films. Her films have been nominated and awarded at numerous film festivals in Europe (Cannes, Venice, Berlinale), in Asia (Tokyo IFF) and in the Soviet Union. She was also a member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1984. In 2015, Lana was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to cinema at Tbilisi and Batumi IFFs. Lana was one of the founders of film faculty at Shota Rustaveli Theatre and Film Georgia State University. She was also one of the initiators of the National Film Center in Georgia, which is based on the French model. She is also known as a translator of poetry, translating and reading poems in French, English, Russian and Georgian. In the 1990s, Lana went into politics and became a member of parliament in 1992. From 1999 to 2008, she served as the Permanent Representative of Georgia in the Council of Europe and UNESCO. She finished to work on her last feature Golden Thread, which will be shown in December 2019 at Tbilisi Film Festival.
Borjana Gaković studied media and film studies in Potsdam and Berlin. Co-editor of the 68th edition of the feminist film journal Frauen und Film (on women filmmakers of the 60s) and the quarterly magazine on cinema politics Kinema Kommunal. She is spokeswoman for the German Association of Municipal and Cultural Cinemas and presents film programs in various cinemas. She has participated in numerous film, theater and media(theory) related projects, inter alia as co-curator of the symposium Reluctant Feminism within the 17th goEast – Festival of Central and Eastern European Film in Wiesbaden 2017, Aufbruch der Autorinnen (The Rise of Women Directors) initiated by Sabine Schöbel (Zeughauskino Berlin, 2015 and 2016), the exhibition and film series Cinema Archeology within the project Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice (2013) as well as Asynchronous – Documentaries and Experimental Films on the Holocaust (2015) of the Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art. She is living in Berlin.
