Our film focuses on Italian author, art critic and feminist Carla Lonzi (1931–1982), founder of the first Roman feminist group Rivolta Femminile in 1972, and her role in the international feminist revolt of the 70s/80s. It drafts the notion of new feminist historiographies by tracing histories unwritten and by opening to date uncharted archives: at the core of its narrative resides Lonzi’s unfinished project on Les Précieuses, a French proto-feminist group active in the 17th century. It is this project our film wants to revisit in an attempt to complete it in a speculative manner, thereby connectinga remote part of the feminist history with possible feminist futures. Adjacently, a tentative lineage in feminist thought towards the present is mapped through a re-staging of an iconic photographic volume titled La strada più lunga by feminist photographer Maria Grazia Chinese from 1975 in the garden of the Casa Internazionale delle Donne in Rome.
Constanze Ruhm