The Long Road to the Director's Chair

In November 1973, around 250 women gathered at the West Berlin cinema Arsenal for the First International Women’s Film Seminar, organized by filmmakers Claudia von Alemann and Helke Sander. For five days, 45 films from seven countries were screened and discussed—about labor struggles, Paragraph 218, sexuality, and the image of women in the media.

Among the guests was Norwegian director Vibeke Løkkeberg, who presented her film “Abort.” With her 16mm camera, she documented the seminar and interviewed the participants about their work in a male-dominated industry. The material was considered lost for fifty years. In 2025, Løkkeberg made a film from it.

The Emmas also found a place at the Women’s Film Seminar in 1973. After their environmental installation “On the Situation of Women in Family and Society” was censored just before the opening at the Landesbildstelle, the seminar invited the three artists to exhibit their work there.

Filmmakers and artists were united by the same concern back then: to counter the media image of women with their own images. The film takes us back to this moment of awakening—and raises the question, like the exhibition, of which of the demands from that time have been fulfilled fifty years later.