Equality as an objective and excellence by flag: five years of the Madrid Film Festival for Women 

When we launched the festival five years ago, we had two clear intentions: we would try to show every year the great wealth and variety of the cinematography directed by women and we would only screen feature films. Based on the results and growth of these 4 editions, we believe we have more than achieved it.

Something has changed since that 2017, when we wrote the project, just before the “Me too” movement: for a couple of years the distributors and sales agencies, classifying the films in their catalogues by categories, added a new category to the usual Crime, Horror, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Teen, Musical, and so on: Female Director.  The presence of female directors at the most important festivals is no longer just cosmetic. The visibility of professional women has caught on amongst the specialized press and, most notably, in 2021 and 2022 the greatest awards from the most important international and national festivals have gone to female directors. With the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, Carla Simón and Alcarràs have made history.

These awards and recognitions, added to the support of critics and the audience, mean a leverage for professionals, they create references and give young female creators means to challenge the principles of authority. Undisputed benchmarks of the Spanish cinema are Isabel Coixet, to whom we award the Festival's 2022 Professional Career Award, and Pilar Palomero, whose feature film La Maternal will premiere in Madrid during the Opening Gala.

These are good symptoms, but the inequities persist and pile up like the layers of an onion. To the historical barriers and prohibitions -material, social, economic and political-, product of a secular male domination, we must add other ceilings and injustices resulting from patriarchal and androcentric values ​​that we do not acknowledge nor condemn because we have come to accept them: slow violence, the glass ceiling, the wage gap, gender clichés, conciliation difficulties, the null or little co-responsibility, manterrupting and mansplaining, and so on.

These barriers have caused a dramatic lack of female references in all areas and in the whole Western culture. These women have not been forgotten from the canon due to an unconscious oversight, they have been voluntarily erased by those who determine it: historians and cultural critics. This silencing is denounced in the documentary Lost Women in Art, directed by the German director Susanne Radelhof, that will be screened at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.

We will also have the presence, at Filmoteca Española, of Jane Gaines, founder of the international research platform Women Film Pioneers Project, from Columbia University, which is recovering the history and names of female film pioneers.

The media, social networks and algorithms have a lot of responsibility in the perpetuation of stereotypes they are comfortable with when it comes to communicating something. In addition, they have a crucial influence on society and on social habits because they grant visibility, propose role models and reach millions of people of different ages, backgrounds and conditions every day.

Therefore, the relevant role that screenwriters have when it comes to change discourses, trends and archetypes because, to this day, our lives have been narrated from the masculine point of view. To deal with these issues, there will bd a specific round table in the Espacio Fundación Telefónica.

This year the guest country for the Focus section is the Netherlands, where in the 1970’s a large number of female directors emerged in documentary and fiction due to their historic openness and interest in other countries and cultures. We'll pay tribute to the pioneer Heddy Honigmann, screening her latest film, as well as the work of internationally recognized directors such as Halina Reijn, Urszula Antoniak, Aliona van der Horst, Karin Junger and Gioia Smid at the Academia de Cine and at Cineteca.

To fight for a greater gender equality, a greater social diversity and for a historical rectification of the canonical narrative is not just a "women's issue". Men must also be involved, as it concerns all of us.

Because if we manage to change all of the above-mentioned inequalities, instead of talking about cinema "made by women", we would simply talk about cinema, which is what we really want: to turn the page and start a new social contract.

Carlota Álvarez Basso and Diego Mas Trelles, codirectors
October 2022