The Long Road to the Director’s Chair

The first international women’s film seminar was organised at the Arsenal cinema in West Berlin in 1973. One of the participants was Vibeke Løkkeberg (born 1945), a Norwegian director whose documentary short film had attracted attention when it was released a year earlier.

Løkkeberg brought with her a crew to Berlin to capture the conversations held during the seminar. The recorded materials were forgotten for years until they were rediscovered in the archives of the Norwegian National Library in 2019. The film directed by Løkkeberg finally saw the light of day more than 50 years after the original seminar, when its premiere was held in the Berlinale Forum section in February 2025.

The restored 16-millimeter footage looks fantastic on the silver screen. The film focuses on conversations between filmmakers from different countries, and when the filming ends, the sound luckily continues recording, leading to a unique narrative solution. The sound, paired with the image of a black screen, serves as an excellent allegory for the reality in which resources for female filmmakers were restricted, and for the need for various silenced voices to be heard.

Løkkeberg herself, who also appears in the film, shows curiosity and directness in her questions. The topics of the conversations are broadly connected to the themes of the international women’s rights movement of the time: career building and the need to prove one’s existence in working life, discrimination in healthcare services, women’s relationship to capitalistic consumerism, as well as taboos related to sex and female body. The film captures something remarkably current and feels surprisingly relevant in the 2020s, even though the events took place more than 50 years ago.

Marjo Pipinen (translated by Nina Moberg)