Ideals

The Mostra Internacional de Films de Dones de Barcelona (MIFDB) is a dissident, feminist and passionate festival that takes place at two different times of the year. MIFDB was born more than three decades ago, in June 1993, in Barcelona.

History

What defines us?

FT.

Feminism and Transfeminism

Irreverence is part of our DNA, as well as intervening in discourses and images, questionning and counterproposing the construction of gender and power in general, laughing and glitching as tools to turn the senses upside down, and collage as a philosophy. We pay close attention to what, seemingly untimely, produces new sparks of light.

Ma.

Memory and Archive

Revisiting the creative work of women from the past is an act of survival. Through genealogical legacies, the experience of those who have gone before us or the wisdom of their methods, the MIFDB has drawn a unique cinematographic map year after year. Far from drawing up a general and unpositioned list of women’s cinema, our archive is built on the action of collecting, year after year, the most urgent – but not necessarily the most recent – audiovisual productions. Through creative and collaborative projects such as Archipelago, we make the writing of a continuum of existence, the restoration of these memories and genealogies, a political priority.

C.

Filmmakers

We defend women’s authorship. We want to make space for other cinematic histories that include the presence and voices of dissident bodies and identities systematically erased by the official narrative. The filmmakers referred to in the name of the festival, these women in the plural, constitute an inaccessible authorial subject, as does the feminist political subject, which changes and transforms.

fft.

Feminist Film Thought

The MIFDB was born out of a desire for pedagogical action and conceptual creation. It aims to shed light on a space obscured by cinematographic androcentrism. Reflection is a fundamental part of the project: we practice and activate it in the sessions, in the editorial room of the Mostra Publicaciones and through educational activities in schools and universities.

Cc.

Cinema and Creation

The MIFDB values mixing, defends eclecticism and has fun with bastardy. On our screens, television programmes, experimental films and net.art pieces coexist with more conventional documentary and fiction productions. The eccentric space often occupied by female/feminist audiovisual creation makes the MIFDB a border crosser, a centrifugal programmer. Through its open calls, MIFDB is also configured as a creative space that encourages creative mobilisation in diverse formats.

Fc.

Feminist Choices

The MIFDB is a non-competitive festival that takes place throughout the year.

Its political choices correspond to the desire to make cultural work more compatible with people’s lives and caring. Among the concerns of the MIFDB is the debate on the role of festivals in the cinematographic path. In this way, we have liberated programming from the dynamics of competition, which has allowed us to seek other connections, auscultatory of pending social debates.

As a result, the cinematographic cartography that has been drawn up over the years has been detached from the single logic of the algorithm.

C.

Cooperativism

The MIFDB’s aim is the implementation of a relational policy of listening, cooperation and collaboration. We work within the framework of the Drac Màgic cooperative for audiovisual pedagogy and in a network of local and international institutions. MIFDB is co-founder and member of Trama (Coordinating Committee of Film, Video and Multimedia Exhibitions and Festivals made by Women in Spain), IWFFN (International Women Film Festival Network) and Catalunya Film Festivals (CFF), among others.

Me.

Meeting Space

The MIFDB has been set up as a meeting place where the experience of the cinema can be shared. Open to unexpected readings, feminist hacks of ‘official’ film history, experimental challenges to androcentric narratives, transforming personal and collective imaginaries.

The past: a tale of beginnings

The first edition of the International Women’s Film Festival was held in Barcelona in June 1993, as a result of the involvement with the spaces and debates of the feminist movement in the city, and learning from role models initiatives both internationally and nationally, pioneers in the dissemination of women’s films.

It was the result of complicity with the spaces and debates of the feminist movement in the city, and of learning from referential initiatives at both international and national levels, precursors in the dissemination of films made by women. In the first edition, its founders, Marta Selva and Anna Solà, who were part of the audiovisual cooperative Drac Màgic, set the programmatic bases: the rescue of the pioneers of cinema, the attention to cinematographies from different latitudes and authors, the pursuit of the imprint of feminism in cinematographic art, the search for formal and format diversity, and a panoramic view of recent productions in a feminist key. Thirty editions later, the MIFDB remains true to its founding spirit and continues to focus its work on the dissemination of film culture and the enrichment of feminist debates in the cinema.

In the 1980s, the desires and opportunities of various women’s groups converged to organise festivals celebrating feminist cinema and cinema made by women in specific and particular ways. Drac Màgic was inspired by the work of the organisers of the Festival de Films de Femmes de Créteil (1979-present), the Festival de Films et Vidéos des Femmes de Montréal (1985-1992), the Internationales Frauen Film Festival Dortmund+Köln (1984/1987-present) and the Festival Internazionale Cinema e Donne in Florence (1988-present), as well as other associations, feminist distributors and international networks.

The participation in the KIWI (Kino Women International) network meeting in Montreal in 1987, led by filmmaker Lana Gogoberidze, was one of the founding moments of MIFDB.

In June 1990, within the framework of the IV International Feminist Book Fair in Barcelona – promoted, among others, by LaSal. Edicions de les dones – Drac Màgic programmed the Semana del cine realizado por mujeres at the headquarters of the Filmoteca de Catalunya.

Three years later, the MIFDB inaugurates its first edition. This first step was taken in close collaboration with the Festival de Cine y Vídeo Realizado por Mujeres, in Madrid, and the Muestra Internacional de Cine y Mujeres, in Pamplona, the two projects that had paved the way in Spain for the promotion and dissemination of women’s cinema.

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