monica freeman, ca 1977 • Photo: john wise
feminist elsewheres
April 19-20, 2025
Two-day film and conversation program, Maysles Documentary Center
Queer-feminist film work is collective, transnational, and complicated. The networks that emerge from it are expansive, ephemeral, and in need of care. With this program feminist elsewheres is looking for connections between historical and contemporary feminist film, tracing the stories, times, and border-crossing lineages of its existence.
From the Black feminist film scene in the US and film gatherings in Europe in the 1970s to poetic negotiations of borders and memories between Nigeria, Thailand, and Germany, this program is an unfinished search for the significance of queer-feminist film.
The event opens with a selection of films based on the feminist elsewheres research on the 1973 First International Women’s Film Seminar, Berlin. Other programs will include the complete works of Monica Freeman, contemporary films by Arisa Purkpong & Jana Buch as well as the German Television production The Snake in My Bed by LA Rebellion director Omah Diegu.
5:30 PM – SUNDAY 04/20/2025
POETRY OF CROSSING
The Snake in My Bed
Omah Diegu, DE 1995, 82 min.
Introduction by Allyson Nadia Field
The Snake in My Bed by LA Rebellion filmmaker Omah Diegu (Ijeoma Iloputaife) tells the story of her application for her son’s citizenship after the white German father denies his parenthood. The film captures her fight against structural racism as a poetic negotiation of borders and friendships between Nigeria and Germany. In what the filmmaker calls an “abstract documentary” she acts as her son’s griot, giving him the story of his origin as a gift in the form of a film. She recalls: “I made The Snake in my Bed as I would any of my paintings: an abstract vomit from the very depth of my soul.” Produced with funding by Kleines Fernsehspiel, part of the German public television broadcaster ZDF, the experimental film has received little attention since its release, despite its formal experimentation and continuing political urgency.
Omah Diegu understands herself first and foremost as a fine artist whose move into filmmaking has its roots in journalism in Nigeria in the 1970s and her experience with press censorship. She joined UCLA when being admitted as the first African woman to the film program in the late 1970s.
$15 General Admission / $7 Reduced Price
$40 / ALL EVENTS on BOTH DAYS
feminist elsewheres began as a festival in 2023 in response to two events that took place in Berlin: the 1973 First International Women’s Film Seminar and its 1997 revisitation ...the point is to change it. Films, Festivals, Feminism. It now operates as a collective at the intersection of archival research, film programming, and artistic experimentation.
No film stands alone.
No history is stable.
feminist elsewheres is many.
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