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.

SATURDAY, APRIL 19TH – 5:00 PM
WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN

All Women Are Equal
Marguerite Paris, US 1972, 15’

I Am Somebody
Madeline Anderson, US 1970, 28’

Introduction by feminist elsewheres 

In 2023, 50 years after the Berlin First International Women’s Film Seminar, we opened our feminist elsewheres festival with a film that screened at the event in 1973 – and another film that could have been shown based on its year of production. In 2025, the urgency to curate these titles remains. The program reflects on the absences, exclusions, and losses in the histories of feminist film.

All Women Are Equal is a unique portrait of a white trans woman reporting on her everyday life in Nottingham, England, and the inherent difficulty of openly living out her gender identity. The asynchronous relationship of sound and image contributes to the deconstruction of female subjectivity, equally emphasizing narrative and gesture. The collective perspective announced by the title corresponds with today’s claim for gender justice.

I Am Somebody takes us back to the civil rights movement in the United States. Madeline Anderson follows the successful strike of hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina, demanding higher wages and the right to join the local union. Among others, civil rights activist Coretta Scott King (wife of Martin Luther King Jr.) speaks out in support of the labor struggle led by predominantly Black women. Out of this collective concern emerges the strength of subjective self-assertion.

$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.

Curated by the feminist elsewheres collective. Follow their work and sign up for their newsletter.

PROGRAM FLYER:

WITH GENEROUS SUPPORT FROM: