Dark Spring

Director: Ingemo Engström

1970 / 89min / DCP

Engström’s graduation film for the University of Television and Film Munich follows a recently divorced doctor as she hits the road to pay calls on her female friends—including filmmaker Katrin Seybold, actor Edda Köchl, and educator Ilona Schult—to discuss such matters as communal living, unconventional child rearing, and utopian love. A docufiction in which female voices not only predominate but exclude all male interruptions, culminating in a reading of Valeria Solanas’s call-to-revolt “SCUM Manifesto,” which Engström describes as “a gesture of resistance.” “Strives for beauty and yet speaks of politics nonetheless. No one else from our generation attempted this connection of cinematographic beauty and contemporary politics.” —Harun Farocki