With Love and Rage

1980, following the election of Ronald Reagan, America rearms. Facing the war machine, two thousand women encircle the Pentagon and awaken another form of power, rooted in care and vulnerability.

“We are gathering at the Pentagon on November 17 because we fear for our lives.  We fear for the life of this planet, our Earth, and the life of our children who are our human future… We have come here to mourn and rage and defy the Pentagon because it is the workplace of imperial power which threatens us all.” These lines opened the declaration of the first Women’s Pentagon Action in November 1980. A date cited as one of the key milestones marking the dawn of ecofeminism and an event that Bojina Panayotova recreates not so much with objectivity but rather by showing the power and energy running through it. The film is fragmentary, interweaving archives, stories, voices, songs, and takes care to leave room for a collective political voice without sidelining the personal trajectories making it up. The whole moves forward guided by a story that is written between the images: a single voice combining excerpts of testimonies of the women who were there. Speeches from the leading lights of feminism and ecofeminism reinforce the image, strengthen and link together bodies and experiences. Their voices and their texts written before or after the event run through the film and beyond. Sources and times merge, almost making us believe that we are hearing voices from today. The stunning archive images of filmmakers, able to create a singular form amidst these women surrounding the Pentagon, are ones that should be shared, and which remind us that progress is achieved by insisting and beginning again and again. 

Clémence Arrivé Guezengar