IT 1965 | Director: Cecilia Mangini | Script: Felice Chilanti | Camera: Luciano Graffigna | Editor: Marco Menenti | Music: Egisto Macchi | Production: Unitelefilm | Colour & b/w | DCP | 29 min | italian OV with english SUB | Fondazione Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico (AAMOD)

Mangini, in her work as well as her relationships, chose the side of the marginalised, whether they’d been placed there because of who they were or what they believed or because of the role they had been forced to occupy. She was interested in the position of women on the margins, particularly elderly and working-class women; through them she shows us the struggles of a country moving from a traditional society to a modern, individualist nation. Essere donne (1965), or Being Women, the film for which Magnini is perhaps best known, illustrates this well. In it, Mangini takes us through the difficult lives of women who worked in Italian factories and tobacco plants from Milan to Apulia during the years that were labelled latterly il boom economico: the “economic miracle”. She shows us families who have had to emigrate north from Southern Italy to find work. The film offers a reflection on the thousands who moved to Milan to work in chemical production, heavy machinery, or construction and to Turin to work for the likes of Fiat and Olivetti. (Allison Grimaldi Donahue, another-screen.com/cecilia-mangini)

PER 1981 | Director: María Barea | Script: Carmen Barrantes | Camera: Alejandro Legaspi | Music: Fernando Espinoza | Production: Ana Correa, Pierre Hoffmann, Faust Film München | Colour | 16mm | 30 min | dubbed german version | EZEF

„This film is also about work and bread and a roof over one's head; that is, about the most basic human needs. Rosa Duenas tells her story, which is at the same time the story of a settlement on the edge of Lima – 'El Planeta' to its residents – in which women join forces. Rosa Duenas and the other women represent a new type of Peruvian woman who no longer accepts her poverty as inevitable.“ (Frauenfilmhandbuch, Berlin 1983)

Two-thirds of Lima's population live in villages like "El Planeta". These settlements were formed of necessity due to the poverty of their residents. Rather than adapting to the precarious situation, in Maria Barea's film the residents demonstrate solidarity in diverse ways to combat social evils such as hunger, illness, illiteracy and a lack of canalisation and childcare. This film rekindles the viewer's awareness of the vital role of community and cohesiveness, and of people's aspiration and fight for a better country in solidarity.

This film, along with Al-Ahlam al-Mumkinna / Permissible Dreams by Ateyyat El Abnoudy (Egypt 1983), is part of the seven-part series "As Women See It", distributed by the Evangelical Centre for Political and Developmental Film Work, EZEF.

GB 1976 | Director: London Women’s Film Group, Women’s Centre London | Editor: Pam Bosworth, Jenny Clevett | Music: Jean Watson, Joy Purnell, Boo Watson, Lorna Boschman | Production: Jane Oliver, Marcia Kirby, Power of Women Collective / Wages for Housework Campaign | Colour | DCP of VHS | 31 min | english OV | London Community Video Archive (LCVA)

A central theme of the autonomous women's movement of the 1970s was unpaid housework – mostly done by women – and the corresponding societal division of labour into spheres of (re-) production. A related problem was women's considerably worse pay for wage labour. In 1972, the international "Wages for Housework" campaign began, politicising housework and raising awareness of the historic dimension of this model for the division of labour.

The campaign film All Work And No Pay was produced in 1975, at the height of the movement, by the Power of Women Collective (London, Bristol); it was broadcast in 1976 on the BBC's Open Door programme. The London Women’s Film Group, a feminist collective, participated in the shoot. The film provides deep insight into the campaign: sharp analyses, political songs, women's group meetings, clever comments by passersby, the creation of international connections in the women's movement, etc. Multiple connections to our present day suggest themselves. It is characteristic of the film that „race, class and gender“ are examined, not least from an intersectional perspective.