London: Open City Documentary Festival – No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and The Moving Image
No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image is dedicated to works of non-fiction that seek to invent new audiovisual languages for the representation of gendered experience. In the program No Master Territories 5: Family Self-Portraits.
Film program:
Susana
Susana Blaustein Muñoz | 1980 | Argentina, USA | 23’ | 16mm (digital transfer) | English spoken
In this reflexive work of autobiography, Susana Blaustein Muñoz asks friends and family members to speak about her and weaves their testimonies together with her own responses and an array of filmic and photographic materials. Through this chorus of conflicting perspectives, a fragmentary picture of Susana as a lesbian artist who has left her traditional family in Argentina to live abroad takes shape. According to film critic Beatrice Loayza, the filmmaker “creates a portrait of herself as viewed by other women. The question becomes not whether these women are able to hit the bull’s-eye on who exactly Susana is; it is about exploring the different sources from which identity can be constructed.”
Susana courtesy The Swedish Archive for Queer Moving Images.
Finding Christa
Camille Billops and James Hatch | 1991 | USA | 55’ | 16mm (digital transfer) | English spoken
In Finding Christa, Camille Billops reunites with her daughter twenty years after giving her up for adoption at age four. More than simply telling the story of a family, Billops and Hatch weave together heterogeneous modes of discourse to reflect on freedom, responsibility, Black women’s construction of selfhood, and the persistence of the past in the present. As Billops puts it, “Finding Christa is a plea for women to think about their choices. You should never let anyone take those choices away from you.”
With an introduction by Erika Balsom.
Full program here for the No Master Territories program.
