Calamity Jane & Delphine Seyrig: A Story

Babette Mangolte
Calamity Jane & Delphine Seyrig: A Story

FR/US, 2020, 87′, Slo. sub.
3,80 €

A homage to Delphine Seyrig and her fascination with the book Calamity Jane’s Letters to her Daughter. These letters from a mother to an absent daughter became a feminist landmark in the late 1970s. Delphine decided to work on a film project about Calamity Jane to reveal Jane’s sensibility and insights about life, as expressed in her letters to her daughter who never received them because they were never sent. Delphine Seyrig’s reading of those letters is an opportunity for self-reflection about feminism and motherhood. It is also her homage to woman’s creativity and the commitment to share other women’s stories.

The screening is going to be introduced by Petra Meterc and followed by her live video Q&A with the director.

“I had Delphine’s various draft scripts, a storyboard, and the 16mm footage that I could use. I tried to edit the 16mm film to shift from fact to fiction to an imaginary other world. In that world charismatic people like Calamity Jane and her daughter lived. It is also lucky that in 1983, I shot images where Delphine did nothing but reflect on what to do next. The staging of her in her car thinking, in a café reading an edition of Calamity’s letters or in her hotel room at daybreak, permitted me in late August 2019 to construct Delphine’s interior monologue. In it, she figures out what to do next. Not giving up is what the film had to be about, as it was Delphine’s greatest strength.” – Babette Mangolte

Produced by Babette Mangolte. Special thanks to Etel Adnan, Nicole Ferrer Fernández (Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir), Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Duncan Youngerman, Giovanna Zapperi.

Co-organised by: City of Women, Kinodvor, in collaboration with the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir; Supported by: City of Ljubljana, Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Public Administration, French Institute in Slovenia, U.S. Embassy in Slovenia.

As part of the European project Women on Women co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.