Country: France, Poland
Year: 2024
Duration: 14'
Emma Goldman is called in the middle of the night to help deliver a baby in a poor Jewish family of Brooklyn, with many mouths to feed. She tries to alleviate the suffering of the woman in labour. Back home, she is confronted by her partner Ed, exhausted by her absences. Forced to choose between her love for him and her activism, she writes the influential speech The Tragedy of Female Emancipation
Biography
film director
Macha Ovtchinnikova
Eastern Europe & Jewish descendent, Macha Ovtchinnikova’s work is inspired by the heroic and tragic stories that shaped her childhood: the struggle of the people in the socialist revolution and the tragedy of the Jews. She mixes a documentary approach, visual arts and fiction, creating a very powerful mise-en-scène. She is a professor of Contemporary Cinema history & Aesthetics at the University of Strasbourg. Red Emma is Macha’s first fiction film.
FILMOGRAFIA
The Scar of the Earth (cm, doc, 2020), My Russian 90’s (doc, 2021), Red Emma (cm, 2024).
Declaration
film director
“Red Emma is an evocation of various aspects of the life (midwife, lover, activist) of feminist anarchist Emma Goldman, which led her to write the speech The Tragedy of Female Emancipation in 1906. The indoor sets are built and filmed on a theatre stage. The sets are only partially complete, leaving things to the imagination, rather than accurate historical reproductions. The mise en scène is a subtle mix of naturalism and visual arts, with a strong social component. There are numerous anachronisms in the film, to support the idea of the timelessness of Emma Goldman’s ideas, which advocates a protean feminism that each woman can invent as she pleases (mother/lover/married/single), and at the center of which are love and sexuality.”
Cast
& Credits
DIRECTOR, SCREENPLAY: Macha Ovtchinnikova. CINEMATOGRAPHY: Alice Desplats. EDITING: Flore Guillet. PRODUCTION DESIGN: Sarah Schneider. MUSIC: Frédéric Alvarez. CAST: Salomé Richard, Grégoire Tachnakian, Caroline Corme, François Briault, Thelma Leullier, Kostia Titrent, Vadim Alvarez, Michaël Titrent, Frédéric Alvarez. PRODUZIONE: Laure Dahout, Pascal Marquilly for Tiresias Films, BipTV, Groupe A - Coopérative Culturelle.
CONTACT: Tiresias Films lauredahout@gmail.com
