Filming Varda at work afforded much insight into her views about cinema, her improvisatory methods, and her refusal to keep a strict separation between professional and family life, in the service of realism. Unlike the customary practices on sets organised to serve male genius, “the mother of the Nouvelle Vague”, as Varda is affectionately known, actively collaborates with her cast and crew, many of them women. Varda introduces Nurith Aviv (who also appears in The Long Road to the Director’s Chair, the second film in this double bill programme) as the camerawoman. She also gives roles to her teenage daughter and four-year-old son, who later interrupts her interview with Raganelli to say goodnight.

But despite the freedom with which Raganelli and Varda seem to be able to approach their films, both are no strangers to the discrimination levelled by a film industry that was stymied by a lack of trust in women filmmakers. Raganelli, who wrote a film script that was greenlit by a German broadcaster, was pushed by her producers to allow a man to direct it. Forced to pivot to television, she often had to fund her documentaries: as a case in point, this film was made on spec. In the film, Varda also states that the only way to make the independent feminist cinema she wanted was to produce and finance it herself. However, when asked if they could speak of female expressions in cinema, Varda expresses her hopeful view that the beginnings of a movement were taking shape:

“There are so many theoretical points of view from which to approach feminism that we can’t get into details. But I think all women who do something for women, and express themselves and find a creative identity—that’s the movement.“

Katja Raganelli (b. 1938, Yugoslavia) was a documentary filmmaker, whose research produced not only primary sources in film history in the form of her interviews, but offers a way of thinking about cinema and the world. She was one of the few selected to be part of the inaugural class at the University of Television and Film in Munich, of which only a handful were women. Since the 1970s, she has created a vast body of work consisting mainly of portraits of pioneering women filmmakers like Agnès Varda and Valie Export, but also artists and actresses like Delphine Seyrig. Her approach for these documentaries for television was collaborative, and her films were, above all, informative and accessible for everyone.