Sisters With Transistors

2021 BEST INTERNATIONAL LONG DOCUMENTARY

TITLE	Sisters With Transistors
COUNTRY	UK / France / USA
YEAR	2021
DIRECTOR	Lisa Rovner
LENGHT	85′ 00″
FORMAT	Digital
SOUND	MARTHA SALOGNI
EDITING	MICHAEL AAGLUND, MARIKO MONTPETIT, KARA BLAKE
PRODUCTION	Anna Lena Films, Willow Glen Films

MOTIVATION

Sisters with transistors, Lisa Rovner’s first film, is a powerful, lively and exciting fresco that unveils the stories of forgotten female pioneers in the electronic music. The storytelling is built through extraordinary archive footage, and a real composition of image and sound, enhanced by one of the great protagonists of electronic music of all time Laurie Anderson. The result is a strong work that emotionally impacts the viewer but above all that fills an historical void and confirms how – until a few decades ago – women creativity has been underestimated and considered exceptional, making difficult, and often impossible, the networking between female artists.

SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS is the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today.
The film maps a new history of electronic music through the visionary women whose radical experimentations with machines redefined the boundaries of music, including Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Pauline Oliveros, Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne Amacher, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel.
The history of women has been a history of silence. Music is no exception.

DIRECTOR

Lisa Rovner

Franco-American director, writer and artist Lisa Rovner (1979) lives in London. She makes films, music videos and commercials and she has worked with fashion brands such as Acne, Liam Gillick and Maison Martin Margiela. She is interested in sound, archiving and bringing politics and philosophy to film. Her work has been presented, for example, at the FIAC Art Fair, at the Paris Film Festival and in the Anthology Film Archives. Sisters with Transistors is her first documentary.