THE DAY ICELAND STOOD STILL (Usa-Iceland, 2024, 70′)

Wednesday, October 2 at 6:30 pm, Cinema Romano, Screen 1

Event in collaboration with the associations Rete al Femminile and Turin City for Women

Job Film Days continues to address the issue of women’s work with an event on Wednesday, October 2 at 6:30 pm at the Cinema Romano, organized in collaboration with the associations Rete al Femminile and Torino Città per le Donne. The event will feature a screening of The Day Iceland Still Stood (USA-Iceland, 2024), the film that traces a unique historical period for Iceland culminating in the day of October 28, 1975 when women took to the streets to demand family, social, labor and equal pay rights. The first film for cinema by U.S.-based Pamela Hogan, it is part of the series of works the director has devoted to investigating the role of women. Before the film, the short film Shirin’s Bitter Tears by Iranian director Amin Fallah will be screened.
Followed by a debate with Barbara Damiano (blogger, Rete al femminile), Elisabetta Zurigo (advocate, Rete al femminile), Deniz Kivage (advocate, Torino Città per le Donne).

Methods of access: the event can be accessed by purchasing tickets online or at the Cinema Romano box office.

SHIRIN’S BITTER TEARS (Iran, 2024, 7′)

Director: Amin Fallah
Screenplay: Amin Fallah
Production: Amin Falah
Director of photography: Vahid Biuteh
Editing: Mohammad Amin Torughi
Music: Younes Eskandari
Cast: Mehrnoosh Sattari, Hassan Askari

Shirin, a female director who is prohibited to travel because of the restriction upon arts, dedicates herself to working as a hawker. In order to get her pieces back, she enters the cold and harsh environment of municipal offices.

Amin Fallah was born in 1996. He graduated at the Iranian Youth Cinema Association, and he got into the avant-garde cinema at the age of 15. He directed many avant-garde documentaries and narrative short films, among which Human Desire, Die Hard, Vent e Shirin’s Bitter Tears.

Filmography: Shirin’s Bitter Tears (s.f., 2024, 7′), Vent (s.f., 2020, 20′), Die Hard (s.f., 2017, 17′), Human Desire (s.f., 2015, 16′), In My City (s.f., 2014, 5′).

THE DAY ICELAND STOOD STILL (Usa – Iceland, 2024, 70′)

Director: Pamela Hogan
Animation: Joel Orloff
Director of photography: Helgi Felixson
Editing: Kate Taverna
Music: Margrét Ran (canzone sui titoli di coda Future Forever di Björk)
Production: Other Noises, Krumma Films

One morning in the autumn of 1975, 90% of Icelandic women left their jobs and walked out of their homes, refusing to work, cook, and take care of their children. Therefore, the country stopped to become ?the best place in the world to be a woman?. It was October 28,1975 and a flood of Icelandic women poured, like a lava flow in the land of volcanoes, through the streets of Reykjavik peacefully occupying the capital’s central square. They came from all over the island. It was the day of the strike, or ?day off?, to demand equal family, social, labour and pay rights. It was a revolutionary gesture organised in the preceding months after a UN World Congress on the theme of Women was held in Reykjavik in the summer of that year.
For the first time those women, now elderly, tell their stories and retrace that unique period that brought Iceland to the forefront of women’s rights in the following decades as they began to achieve important roles in society. Their voices are interspersed with archive images and beautiful animated scenes that visualise both salient historical moments and the thoughts and desires of those indomitable women of all ages.

Pamela Hogan (USA) is a director, screenwriter and producer. In her works, mainly for television productions, she has always investigated the role of women in difficult social conditions. For PBS, she was co-creator and executive producer of the series Women, War & Peace , the first to explore the issues of war and peace from a women’s perspective, for which she wrote two episodes, I Came to Testify (2011), about Bosnian women who broke the silence and spoke out about the rape and sexual slavery they endured, and The War We Are Living (2011), about two Afro-Colombian women who fight for their land confronting the militias. Her other work includes executive producing for the PBS series Wide Angle , in which she created the episode Ladies First (2004), about the prominent role of women in post-genocide Rwanda. The Day Iceland Stood Still is her first film for cinema.

Filmography: Ducks Under Siege (1987, film for television, doc), Wildlife Wars USA: Bears Under Siege (1991, film for television, doc), Ultimate Weapon: The H-Bomb Dilemma (mm, 2000, film for television, doc), America ReFramed (2015, tv series, doc, un episodio), The Day Iceland Stood Still (2024, doc).