Durango – Basque Country
Final Report
A project by STREEEN – OVNI – ROSA KADIN DERNEGI
Eurimages Gender Equality Sponsorship 2021 – 2022 – 2023
This year The Purple Meridians (TPM), co-created by Streamthings (Turin-Italy), Observatori Ovni (Barcelona-Catalonia) and Rosa Kadin Derneği (Diyarbakir- Turkey) and funded by the Eurimages Gender Equality sponsorship, benefited from the collaboration with the Durango Book Fair, Suargi Elkartea, the project IMFilm, the Associació Catalana Para la Pau (Catalan Peace Association), the Zutarri Kultur Elkartea (Cultural Association Zutarri).
The third edition – Durango (Basque Country)
The third edition of The Purple Meridian was held in the Basque city of Durango within the context of the Azoka (Book-Video-Music Fair) on 7 December 2023.
The decision to “move” to Durango was in line with the spirit of the project that aims at connecting women filmmakers across meridians and benefited from new collaborations that developed since the second edition of the TPM in 2022, in the Catalan city of Olot. Indeed, after the residency in Olot (held in June 2022) we had a meeting (October 2022) with the Association Suargi and some women Basque directors in Durango. They were particularly interested in hosting the third edition of the TPM in the city within the context of the Azoka (Book-Video-Music Fair) that take place there every year in December. The city of Durango has a long tradition of promoting cinema made by women and host screenings and debates throughout the year. We started our collaboration in March 2023 presenting some movies by Kurdish Women film directors (all participants of TPM), namely, Ahu Ozturk and Lisa Calan.
Following on some of the suggestions made during the meetings of the TPM 2021 and 2022, we decided that the focus of the 2023’s edition will be, on one hand, the difficulties, responses, proposals for women in the film industry to conjugate work and care work (maternity, care of children, care of elderly, care of ill partner/family member etc) and on the other, the situation of women with different abilities in the film industry and how that reality is dealt with in cinema.
A first-of-a-kind general strike in the Basque Country on 30 November — perhaps without precedent anywhere in Europe – saw both women and men taking industrial action to demand “a public-community care system.” Workers from all sectors, including the film industry and more in general culture, participated in the strike, confirming the urgency of the issue.
As we were preparing the conference to be held on 7 December, the war on Gaza started. War was already one of the themes to be discussed at the conference, especially but not only, in relation to different abilities. One of the TPM Kurdish director, Lisa Calan, lost both her legs as a result of an Islamic State attack on an electoral campaign meeting in the city of Diyarbakir in 2015.
Some other guests of this year’s event had lived and were living in war situations and would talk about that. We heard a first hand account of what was going on in Gaza from Palestinian filmmaker Mira Sidawi, who opened this year’s conference. The devastating testimony set the tone of the conference that prompted inspiring interventions and developed very strong bonds among the participants in both the morning and afternoon sessions.
Morning session
The morning session was dedicated to the experience of women filmmakers working in the context of war and conflict or who have lived in conflict zones before migrating, and what it means to make cinema in, and in relation to, experiences of conflict.
Many were the suggestions for possible future work to organize collectively.
Actress Itziar Ituño, well known internationally for her role in the Casa de Papel, introduced the element of so called minorized languages, while Kristina Berasain spoke of the role of culture and cinema in particular, in countering an increased (and very masculine) language of war.
Among the proposals were the creation of a Cine Assembly, a platform (wherever possible in person) to share films among women (and not only) and create debates opportunity about different issues.
Something very concrete and on which, we are pleased to say, we already start working. The creation of a net of places and people in Europe, the Middle East and South America, where to present different works of art, not just visual.
Another proposal that came out was to think about a collective video that will deal with the issues discussed in these three years of the TPM.
Screening session
Between the two sessions there was the very well attended screening at the cinema in Durango of two shorts, The Wall by Mira Sidawi and a work in progress by Mary Jirmanus Saba.
Afternoon session
The afternoon session focused on the challenges, as well as the revolutionary potential, of conjugating filmmaking work and care work (defined as the care of children, parents, partners or other loved ones), as well as the exclusions women filmmakers with disabilities face in the sector.
We opened the session with Mary Jirmanus Saba, connected from the United States via Zoom. She is working on a film about being a mother and an artist. Or, as she put it, “Mothers can do anything! (an artist tries to find the time to write a theoretical text).”
The work “explores the intersections between gendered reproductive labor that keeps the cultural space in motion, and the reproductive labor of motherhood.”
Mary’s contribution gave way to an interesting debate about how women in the film industry conjugate – or try to – their choices in their private lives and their work, in a sector which shows little or no mercy when it comes to respecting women’s choices.
Ahu Ozturk suggested that a stronger collaboration among women is needed in film projects and proposed to strengthen the network provided by TPM in these past three years.
Evening press conference and wrap up
The conference ended with a press conference at the Durango Museum to sum up the work done during the day and to list the ideas and proposals for the future.
The press conference saw the participation of Palestinian filmmaker Mira Sidawi and was presented by the co-organizers from Suargi Cultural Association and the Durango Book Fair.
The proposals and ideas delivered included the commitment by participants to continue work towards the consolidation of the TPM network built in the past three years that has been expanding even further in 2023 thanks to the presence of filmmakers from the Basque Country, Greece, Buratya, Palestine, Northern and Eastern Syria.
There was a commitment to expand the distribution, especially online, but also encouraging in person screenings and Q&A of the work of the filmmaker who participated to the 2023 edition.
Online Program
The online program in 2023 has begun quite early on, as we asked the participant filmmaker to produce a video contribution or short video interviews about the issues to be discussed at the conference in Durango as well as about why they decided to tell their stories and/or deal with the issues of care work, disability and war through the medium of cinema.
Three videos were produced based on these guidelines, entitled Cinema is… and in September we launched the first version of the online program pages with these three video statements and with film cards and trailers of films that we had selected to be screened in Durango and/or in the online program.
Meanwhile, the first pages of The Purple Meridians 2023 were produced with the written content and biographies of the participants in the project website (purplemeridians.org)
We then proceeded to identify films to contract for the online review, which would deepen the themes discussed in the workshop and complement the films presented in cinemas during the Durango Fair.
Thanks also to the contribution of external partnerships (University of Modena), we were able to produce a program of four films by some of the female directors present at the workshop, films that were presented and streamed free of charge worldwide for three days, from 7 to 9 December 2023.
The selection, entitled Women’s Cinema: War, Disability, Care included award-winning films from international festivals, such as Sevinaz Evdike’s Mal / Home (2018), Claudia Tosi’s The Perfect Circle (2014), Ahu Öztürk’s Dust Cloths (2018) and the recently released Post (Cinema) Collective’s Rerooting (2023), and was intended to be representative both of the aesthetics expressed by the international authors participating in the workshop and of the issues debated and explored in Durango. At the end of the three days of free streaming, two of these films remained available to the public for a fee on the Streeen.org website as a form of restitution and dissemination for the future of the work done with The Purple Meridians project.
Press coverage
The two themes addressed by TPM 2023 attracted great attention, especially from the Basque and Spanish media.
Indeed, the Azoka named TPM as one of the highlights of the 2023’s edition and since the press conference on 21 November 2023, TPM featured as a special appointment in all main media.
See, among others, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Prior to the conference TPM featured with a double page in the special supplement dedicated to the Durango Azoka published by the daily paper Berria on 6 December.
Euskadi Irratia (Radio Euskadi) also interviewed 4 of the participants (Itziar Ituno, Kristina Berasain, Ainhoa Olaso and Lara Vilanova) for its special cultural programmes in Basque and Spanish on 7 December.
The Kurdish news agency Firat News also published a feature article about TPM in English.
OVNI followed on its ownwebpage the full conference.
This year’s participants
Mira Sidawi (Palestinian filmmaker)
Ahu Ozturk (Kurdish filmmaker from Turkey)
Lisa Calan (Kurdish filmmaker from Turkey)
Claudia Tosi (Italian filmmaker)
Lara Vilanova (Catalan filmmaker)
Itziar Ituño (Basque actress)
Estibaliz Urresola (Basque filmmaker)
Ainhoa Olaso (Basque filmmaker)
Kristina Berasain (Basque filmmaker and journalist)
Luciana de Mello (Argentinian script writer, journalist and author living in Belfast)
Elli, Mirra and S. (The Post Collective)
Mary Jirmanus Saba (Lebanese filmmaker)
From the TPM coordination: Orsola Casagrande, Rosa Barotsi, Simona Marchesi
Organizers and collaborators
Streamthings
Rosa Kadın Derneği
Observatori OVNI
