The naked body of the pregnant mother. The voice of the daughter. Inside-outside. A song to life. THE MOTHER: “The twelfth day of the twelfth month of the year nineteen-eighty was the day before I gave birth to my second child, my son. I. Naked. To come to terms with my fear, I felt the desire to immerse myself into black water, to re-emerge and cuddle my belly. A remembering forgetfulness that to die giving birth is like being born dying.” THE DAUGHTER: “I return to my second self. Her smell. Mine. The centre I immerse in. Safety is a smell.” The visual material of the film records the secret ritual-performance by Angelidi in 1980. It remained undeveloped, hidden in an attic, for 28 years. In 2008, Angelidi with Walldén re-discovered it, and composed the film.

Available for online screeening from 12 December

Antoinetta Angelidi (b.1950, 30th April) is a pioneer of Greek feminist and avant-garde cinema, and a visual artist. She studied Architecture in Athens, Greece; Film Direction and Editing at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris, France; and Film Theory with Christian Metz. Her work includes four feature-length films – Idées Fixes / Dies Irae (1977), Topos (1985), The Hours - A Square Film (1995) and Thief or Reality (2001) –, as well as short films and art installations. It has been screened in international film festivals and contemporary art museums, as well as in theatres and national television. She uses art history and her dreams as raw material for her work, “distancing [herself] from reality in order to reach out to the Real”. The inversion and juxtaposition of codes, as well as the dream-mechanism and the uncanny, constitute her main creative strategies. The complexity of cinematic heterogeneity and the narrative multiplicity of the different filmic elements characterise her work. She taught for many years Film Direction in the Film School at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, as well as the Universities of Patras, Thessaly and the Aegean. She is a member of the European Film Academy; and a founding member of the Hellenic Film Academy, and Women in Film and Television Greece. A retrospective tribute to her work was included in the 46th International Thessaloniki Film Festival (2005), where she was given the Golden Alexander Award for her lifetime achievement in cinema. A retrospective tribute to her work was also included in the Prismatic Ground Festival (2024) at Anthology Film Archives, New York, where she was given the Ground Glass Award for her outstanding contribution to the field of experimental media. A volume on her work in Greek was published by Thessaloniki Film Festival, and the volume in English ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi was published in ReFocus: The International Directors Series of Edinburgh University Press. Her intimate confession about her life and work, Obsessive Hours at the Topos of Reality (2022), was shot by her daughter Rea Walldén.