Melmaridè (divorced in dialect) is the story of group of women from Piacenza, a small city in the north of Italy, who challenged the disdain of their families and of local institutions by joining the voices of the wider international feminist movement. They first founded a Feminist Collective and later started a public women’s health clinic and counselling centre.

The clinic was a self-directed, self-financed and free of charge structure that offered information on birth control, medical examinations, and help on how to get an abortion at the time when abortion was still illegal in Italy. A political act that arose from a profound urgency for personal freedom and self-awareness, the establishment of the clinic united them and radically changed their personal and political viewpoints.

Forty years later, these women find themselves different, older, but still linked by friendship and the same non-conformist spirit, determined in their desire not to forget that experience that had changed them forever.

Following them in their narration, we realised how important it is that this “small” adventure in provincial Italy is not forgotten, because it is thanks to these individual and collective acts of courage that our freedom has been and is possible. This is a collective story that is made of encounters, memories and intimacy among women who are profoundly different but who are all - more or less - happily melmaridè.

Co-director Elisa Bozzarelli will be joining us for a Q&A after the screening.

Born in a small Italian town. she studied applied arts and graphics design at the ISIA in Urbino. She worked in several graphic design studios, and then switched to publishing. She is a journalist since 2005, and has created pages and illustrations for many periodical magazines in Italy. In the early 2000s she was part of the collective Pornfalkes, active in the Milanese underground scene in the organisation of queer parties and performances. She studied filmmaking at the Scuola Civica di Cinema in Milan, and "Malmaride ' is her first documentary. Since moving to Bristol in 2017, she co-founded the sustainable cuisine project CiboMatto.