– The initiative aims to direct renewed attention to remarkable films overlooked by cinema history, focusing on documentaries by women directors
Another Story, a new, pan-European initiative, is set to launch on 8 March, bringing renewed attention to documentary films made by women and to the voices that have often been overlooked in film history. Developed as a two-year collaboration between five partners – HER Docs Foundation (Poland), Festival dei Popoli (Italy), The Good Media Network/Doxumentale (Germany), the Balkan Documentary Center/Sofia DocuMental (Bulgaria) and Cineuropa (Belgium) – the project aims to reconnect audiences with a rich but under-circulated body of work, and rethink how film history is curated and transmitted.
Supported by the Creative Europe – MEDIA programme, Another Story will unfold through a network of festival screenings and educational initiatives across Europe, complemented by an online component designed to expand access to rarely screened titles. Over the next two years, around 20 films from the 20th and 21st centuries will be presented through different formats, including curated festival programmes, public discussions, critics’ labs and Wikipedia editing workshops, alongside an online selection hosted on a dedicated viewing platform.
Rather than simply highlighting historical “firsts”, the project seeks to emphasise the artistic value and diversity of women’s documentary filmmaking. Its editorial line focuses on rediscoveries and overlooked works that explore social realities through distinctive cinematic forms, from militant political documentaries to hybrid works blending fiction and non-fiction, as well as experimental and avant-garde approaches.
Swiss-based distribution and research collective Loreley Films contributes to the project as guest curator, providing thematic insights that frame the selections. In its curatorial introduction, Loreley argues that the legacy of women filmmakers should not be reduced to pioneering milestones, but recognised for its artistic originality and its influence on contemporary documentary language. By revisiting these works today, the initiative aims to reconnect new generations of viewers and filmmakers with a lineage of cinematic experimentation and political engagement.
Each partner festival approaches the programme through a specific editorial lens rooted in its national context. In Poland, HER Docs Foundation will present a selection of short films produced between the 1960s and 1980s, juxtaposing docs made within the state-run system with video-art practices emerging outside it. “When discussing women’s non-fiction filmmaking under communism, we often think primarily of documentary directors whose work was shaped, to varying degrees, by the dominant framework of socialist realism. However, it is important to remember that with the global rise of second-wave feminism and the increasing availability of lighter, more accessible cameras, film became a tool that was not only for documentary filmmakers,” says Weronika Adamowska, curator at HER Docs.
Festival dei Popoli’s Italian programme looks back at politically engaged filmmaking of the 1960s and 1970s, when feminist collectives and activist movements used cinema as a tool of protest and emancipation. “Our research into documentary cinema created by women in Italy has led us to (re)discover a body of filmmaking – particularly from the 1960s and 1970s – that was profoundly political and militant, using the moving image as a gesture of struggle and denunciation, as a tool for emancipation embedded within a collective discourse,” explains curator Margot Mecca.
In Germany, Doxumentale explores the connections between past and present documentary practices, highlighting the visual language and authorship of filmmakers who shaped the form. “I travelled with Elfi Mikesch to Judenburg, her hometown, to present Judenburg findet statt. Hearing her speak about her way of working with film – her gaze, her trust in images, her sense of form – changed how I watch documentaries to this day,” says the festival’s coordinator, Anna Ramskogler-Witt.
Meanwhile, the Balkan Documentary Center plans to spotlight a rare doc by Bulgarian director Binka Zhelyazkova, whose work was long affected by censorship. “We joined the Another Story project because, despite Balkan Documentary Center’s more than 15 years of work to advance the visibility of documentary cinema, we found that films by women in the non-fiction form remain largely unknown, and even more so those from the Balkan region,” explains the festival’s director, Neda Milanova.
The programme will include titles such as Essere donne (1965) by Cecilia Mangini, a landmark portrait of working-class women in Italy; Gertrud Pinkus’s hybrid documentary The Woman’s Greatest Value Is Her Silence (1980), which explores the experience of Italian migrants in Germany; Yvonne Scholten’s Donna: Women in Revolt (1980), tracing decades of feminist resistance; Elfi Mikesch’s visually daring I Often Think of Hawaii (1978); and Zhelyazkova’s Face and Upside Down (1981), a powerful depiction of women prisoners in Bulgaria.
By bringing these movies back into circulation and contextualising them through festival programming and public debate, Another Story aims to contribute to a broader European effort to rethink the canon of documentary cinema. The project’s organisers hope that rediscovering these works will not only correct historical blind spots, but also inspire contemporary filmmakers by revealing a lineage of bold, formally inventive women directors whose contributions continue to resonate today.
