Superbia is a film cycle looking at the director Ulrike Ottinger.
The screening we held in the Cine_ilegal programme (Bulegoa z/b) steered us to this initiative with the dual goal of getting to know the work of Ulrike Ottinger in greater depth and sharing this knowledge. We have created this dedicated platform to enable us to collectively enjoy the legacy of a director whose work is hard to find through traditional channels.
The eight films in the cycle will be screened in various spaces in Bilbao and Donostia-San Sebastián. The films can be seen in institutional venues as well as private spaces or cultural associations. Some will be incorporated into the programmes of other initiatives.
To complete the cycle, we would like to invite Ulrike Ottinger to give a talk on her work.
Her practice was described in the catalogue for the Ottinger exhibition in the Reina Sofía Museum as follows:
“In Ottinger’s work, reality is just an aura. Each image is a surprise and the films provide subtext for different themes, from social prejudices to ostracism, from power rituals to death. Her reappropriation of the narcissist aesthetic from a feminist discourse makes her work highly unusual and very different from the work of many women – generally documentaries looking at questions from the female universe, such as motherhood, prostitution, racism or financial exploitation. Some cinema historians have recently included Ottinger’s work in the queer film category. Her films renegotiate subjectivity and go beyond the usual debates on gender and sexuality in traditional feminist theory.”
