TITLE Donna: Women in Revolt
COUNTRY The Netherlands
YEAR 1980
DIRECTOR Yvonne Scholten
LENGHT 1h 6′

In Donna: Women in Revolt, Yvonne Scholten impressively portrays 80 years of women’s resistance in Italy. She begins with the fascist attack on the free station Radio Donna in Rome, during a broadcast by the housewives’ collective in January 1979. This is followed by a search for the background of the Italian women’s movement through extraordinary archival footage and interviews.

Scholten highlights women who resisted any form of oppression, such as fascist movements, church, political parties. The film also shows the gap between feminists at the beginning of the century and women in the peasant and labor movements of the time and the “women’s issue” in the major left-wing parties after the war and second-wave feminism. This film thus provides special insight into the often forgotten roles of women in history.

The restoration of Donna: Women in Revolt came about in collaboration with the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision and Eye Filmmuseum, and was made possible thanks to A Season of Classic Films, an initiative of Association des Cinémathèques Européennes (ACE), supported by the EU Creative Europe MEDIA program. A Season of Classic Films highlights the work of European national and regional film archives through a series of free film screenings across Europe. Donna: Women in Revolt is the first screening of 2023 in the series of screenings of restored films organized by ACE across Europe.

DIRECTOR

Yvonne Scholten

Yvonne Scholten is a writer and journalist, born in 1943 in The Hague, Netherlands. She studied political science at the University of Amsterdam. From 1969 to 1982 she worked in Italy as a foreign correspondent for Dutch newspapers, radio and TV. During her time in Italy, she introduced the work of Antonio Gramsci to The Netherlands through her book “Antonio Gramsci. Marxisme als filosofie van de praxis,” published by Van Gennep in 1972.

In 1981 she made the documentary “Donna: vrouwen in verzet” (Women in revolt) for IKON TV. Back in the Netherlands, she worked as an editor for Dutch radio and television from 1983 to 2004. Since 2004 she has worked as a freelancer, devoting herself to research on Dutch volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, publishing several studies on this topic. For more on Yvonne, see the biography edited by Franco Tirletti for the Encyclopedia of Women:

https://www.enciclopediadelledonne.it/edd.nsf/biografie/yvonne-scholten

en_US