„Feministka jest, chociaż szyldu nie ma.” Moje spotkanie z Heleną Amiradżibi

Misiak, Anna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7153-944X (2024) „Feministka jest, chociaż szyldu nie ma.” Moje spotkanie z Heleną Amiradżibi. In: (Nie)Zapomniane dokumentalistki. Wydawnictwo PWSFTiTV, Łódź, Poland. ISBN 978-83-67397-42-1 (In Press)

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Abstract / Summary

This chapter introduces the reader to Helena Amiradżibi, a Georgian documentary filmmaker who, in the 1950s and 1960s, worked at the Documentary Film Studio in Warsaw, Poland. The author's rigorous analysis of four of Amiradżibi's last documentary films—Zambrów (1962), Who Wants a Dress (1963), The Career (1964) and The Weak Woman (1966)—argues that despite not claiming to follow a feminist ideology, retrospectively her documentaries can be classified as courageously feminist. As an unproclaimed but pioneering feminist filmmaker, unusually for her time, Amiradżibi looked at the live experiences of women under communism with care and humour. Through attention to details of individual, diverse women shown on her screen, skilled observation, audacious voice-over narration and creative editing, Amiradżibi was ahead of her time, with each film challenging the illusory gender equality the Communist Party propagated. The author of the text frames her as a trailblazer of the feminist consciousness associated with the Fourth Wave today.

This chapter aims to popularise these archival finds, which were made possible thanks to funding received from the Leverhulme Trust. The author rediscovered the discussed films, which numerous film historians had forgotten and omitted. She then screened them publicly in an invited, live-streamed lecture at a history museum in Warsaw in the autumn of 2023, with financial support from the Polish Female Filmmakers Association. Some financial support from the Polish Film Institute has also contributed to the publication of the book collection titled (in translation) (Un)Forgotten Women Filmmakers, where the chapter will appear in June 2025.

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