It is at this point that the need to write history arises

The Italian feminist, author and co-founder of Rivolta Femminile, Carla Lonzi, dedicated the last years of her life to researching a group of 17th century French proto-feminists known as “Les Précieuses”. This project remained unfinished after her premature death in 1982. In 1992, the publication ARMANDE, SONO IO! appeared, documenting Lonzi's notes, thoughts and sketches on the history of this protofeminist group.   This film takes Lonzi’s unfinished project as starting point and echo chamber for its narrative, in order to rethink it from a contemporary perspective, to highlight specific feminist experiences between three centuries and thus establish a historical continuity where none was (visible) before. 

At the same time, it recounts the story of an unlikely discovery in the basement of a feminist center in Rome, the Casa internazionale delle donne. During her research in the center’s archive, a young feminist filmmaker finds a decaying crate containing film material, that, after forensic examination, is impossibly dated to be 360 years old. Meanwhile, a fictitious feminist radio station called RADIO DAFNE provides commentary on the plot, which also turns its gaze to shards of a dark historical mirror in which fragments of a narrative appear that tells of the oppression and violence to which women have been subjected over the ages. These are integrated into a counter-draft of an alternative history which is a homage to feminist artists from the 17th century to the present day who all relate in different ways to Carla Lonzi. This homage takes in the gamut of an enduring and forgotten history, including artists such as Suzanne Santoro, Maria Grazia Chinese, Stephanie Oursler, Adriana Monti, Annabella Miscuglio, the Roman Collettivo femminista cinema as well as the poet Sappho, the painter Artemisia Gentileschi and the Venetian baroque composer Barbara Strozzi.  

All these elements are interwoven within a journey through time whose protagonists are constantly transforming: they appear as actresses at a casting; as vengeful ghosts haunting a former women's prison in Rome; as the French Précieuses of the 17th century; as feminist filmmakers and as participants in an autocoscienza group in Rome in the 1970s. In this disintegrating time continuum, Carla Lonzi meets the 17th century actress Armande in Palermo: “È a questo punto che nasce il bisogno di fare storia”, it is at this point that the desire to write history arises. The question of how to develop a new approach to feminist historiography is at the heart of Lonzis' research and therefore also of this film. It oscillates between fiction and reality, between real and invented documents (as “memory begins in an invented world”, as the Neapolitan feminist collective Le Nemesiache writes), and at the same time becomes an archive of feminist art itself. (Constanze Ruhm)