“The Strike” by Gabrielle Stemmer | France | 55’ | doc | 2025 | National Premiere
Synopsis:
“One morning I realized I hadn’t made love for three months”. Thus begins Ovidie’s sex strike, as told in her best-selling book “La Chair est triste hélas” (The Flesh is Sad, Alas). Gabrielle Stemmer takes hold of the intimate and political journey of a woman revisiting her past, caught in the web of patriarchy. Through a hypnotic blend of found footage, television archives and amateur films, Stemmer’s political essay exposes the cracks in the heterosexual model.
Gabrielle Stemmer:
Gabrielle Stemmer (1991, France) studied literature and film editing. Her work as documentary filmmaker is focused on exploring archival images, whether historical or contemporary. In 2019 she directed Clean With Me (After Dark), selected and awarded at numerous festivals, as well as the series Femmes sous algorithms in 2023. In 2025 her essay film La Grève (The Strike), an adaptation of Ovidie’s book "La Chair est triste hélas” (The Flesh is Sad, Alas), premiered at San Sebastian.
“It Will Always End in the End” by Nancy Pettinicchio | Canada | 16’ | doc | 2024 | National Premiere
Synopsis:
Gabriel Drolet-Maguire, a queer fashion designer living in Montréal, takes us into their artistic world to speak vulnerably about their HIV diagnosis and the process of acceptance that led them to reach out to the HIV-positive community. IT WILL ALWAYS END IN THE END is a timely and hopeful look at past and present day HIV activism in Quebec.
Nancy Pettinicchio:
Nancy Pettinicchio is an Italian-Canadian non-binary filmmaker from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal exploring topics surrounding gender, mental and physical health, and coming of age. Their first short film FALENA (2022) premiered internationally at the Palm Springs ShortFest, screened in festivals across Canada, the United States, and Europe, and won the image+nation 2022 Best Québec Short Film award. Nancy's second short film and first documentary, IT WILL ALWAYS END IN THE END (2024), explores HIV art activism in Québec. Thanks to support from the Canada Council for the Arts, Nancy is currently writing their debut feature film, PER LA GRAZIA DI DIO.
“Manal Issa, 2024” by Elisabeth Subrin | USA | 10’ | doc | 2025 | Regional Premiere
Synopsis:
Filmed in Beirut on September 22, 2024, just hours before bombing escalated throughout the country, Manal Issa, 2024 presents a haunting interview with the acclaimed Lebanese French actress Manal Issa. Distilled from hours of long-distance conversations between Elisabeth in the U.S. and Manal in Lebanon over the past year, the film intimately considers the role of the actor during the unfolding global conflict.
Elisabeth Subrin:
Elisabeth Subrin’s award-winning films and installations have been presented widely in North America, Europe, South America and Asia. Known for her use of reenactment, beginning with her widely recognized 1997 film Shulie, solo presentations include The Museum of Modern Art, NY, Film Society of Lincoln Center, The Vienna Viennale, ICA London, IDFA, The Bell at Brown University, National Gallery of Art, DC, The Jewish Museum, NY, and in a 2024 retrospective at The Champs Elysées Film Festival in Paris. Group exhibitions and festival premieres include Cannes, Viennale, New York Film Festival and The Whitney Biennial. Subrin's 2022 film Maria Schneider, 1983 premiered at Cannes in Director’s Fortnight and received a 2023 César for Best Documentary Short. Her critically acclaimed feature narrative, A Woman, A Part, premiered in competition at the 2016 Rotterdam International Film Festival and was released theatrically in 2017. A Sundance, Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellow, Subrin is a professor of film and media art at Temple University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
“Naima” by Anna Thommen | Switzerland | 98’ | doc | 2024 | National Premiere
Synopsis:
Naima, a 46-year-old Venezuelan, lives in precarious conditions in Basel and, after many years in the low-wage sector, she secures a traineeship in nursing. However, her happiness collides with a harsh reality: patients love her compassionate humor, but her colleagues perceive her as lacking professional distance. When she fails her internship, her world falls apart. Yet, Naima rises to fight her toughest battle: standing up for herself.
Anna Thommen:
Anna Thommen was born 1980 in Basel, Switzerland. After her initial training as a primary teacher she studied film at the Lucerne School of Art and Design and holds a Master in Documentary Film at the Zurich University of the Arts.
With her films Neuland (2014) and Volunteer (2019) she received a number of awards and nominations. She co-directed an episode in the serialfilm Les Nouvelles Eves (2021). Naima (2024) is her third feature as a director.
“Flying Hands” by Marta Gómez | Spain | 77’ | doc | 2023 | National Premiere
Synopsis:
After giving birth to a deaf daughter, a Pakistani mother questions the custom that would have her hide her child out of family shame, and builds a community that uplifts and inspires deaf children through education and respect.
Marta Gómez:
Screenwriter, director, producer and script consultant. Since 2008, she’s a member of the selection committee for the script residency Plume & Pellicule (Switzerland). She has written fiction for film and television and collaborated in the areas of scriptwriting and production of projects in Spain, Australia, Central America and France. She has worked as a jury and advisor for Proimagenes Colombia , as well as professor of the MA in Creative Writing at the National University of Bogotá.
“The silence of pomegranates” by Clara Baj | France, Italy | 9’ | doc | 2025 | Regional Premiere
Synopsis:
In a coastal town in Calabria, southern Italy, a woman who prefers to remain anonymous breaks the silence surrounding the issue of abortion in the region.
Denouncing the abuses of medical institutions through a poetic and experimental lens, Il silenzio dei melograni is a creative short documentary that attempts to shed light on the privileges and inequalities women face in accessing their own reproductive rights.
Clara Baj:
French anthropologist and documentary filmmaker trained in Visual Anthropology in Paris and directing through DocNomads. Her work explores language, identity, and representation, including research in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has collaborated with several European film festivals and contributed to the East/West Index at Jihlava IDFF.
Her films draw on everyday life, focusing on communication and human connections. She is currently developing research on representations of reproductive rights.
“The Day Iceland Stood Still” by Pamela Hogan | Iceland, USA | 70’ | doc | 2024 | National Premiere
Synopsis:
When 90% of the women of Iceland walked off the job and out of their homes one fall morning in 1975, refusing to work, cook, or take care of the children, they brought their country to a standstill and catapulted Iceland to the “best place in the world to be a woman.” Told for the first time by the women themselves, and laced with playful animation, The Day Iceland Stood Still is subversive and unexpectedly funny. “We loved our male chauvinist pigs,” recalls one of the activists, “We just wanted to change them a little!” Perfectly timed for release in the lead-up to the strike’s 50th anniversary in 2025, the film’s message about the collective power of women to transform their society inspires viewers to reimagine the possible.
Pamela Hogan:
Over her career Pamela Hogan has often focused on stories about ordinary women who do the extraordinary. Co-creator of PBS’s Women, War & Peace series, as EP of PBS’s Wide Angle she originated the Emmy-winning Ladies First about women’s leadership in Rwanda. The New York Times called her film Looks Like Laury, Sounds Like Laury one of the “10 Best TV shows of 2015”. Recognized with a Making a Difference for Women award by the National Council for Research on Women, her work has been honored by the Overseas Press Club, the Television Academy Honor, and the ABA’s Silver Gavel.
“Bad Reputation” by Marta García, Sol Infante | Uruguay | 78’ | doc | 2024 | National Premiere
Synopsis:
Karina makes her living as a sex worker on the road and she is an outspoken activist. Now, at the age of 45, and with her itinerant life, she begins to imagine life working in another field and she starts the way to organize her colleagues for their labor rights. Both challenges are difficult for a woman with a bad reputation.
Marta García:
Marta García lives in Uruguay since 2012 and works in the fields of film programming and distribution, having participated as a programmer in the teams of DocMontevideo, MICGénero, Festival de Málaga, Zinebi, among others. She has distributed around a dozen films in theaters in Uruguay and writes at LatAm Cinema. She has a degree in Audiovisual Communication and is post graduated in cultural management, migration and gender policies.
Sol Infante graduated in Communication and specialized in Photography Direction. She participated in various projects (shorts, features, series) as director of photography. She was one of the founders of the International Film and Human Rights Festival Tenemos Que Ver and was part of the Doc Montevideo FF and “Fememina”. She has also worked as a teacher at the Universidad del Trabajo, Universidad de la República and various programs of the Ministry of Education and Culture.
