Female to Empower 2023

silent green presents

The Female to Empower festival series tells small and big stories of music from an exclusively female perspective. In two editions so far, 2019 and 2020, the series has shown cinematic portraits of pioneers of electronic music and forgotten funk feminists of the 1970s, it has been dedicated to fearless, loud and provocative women of the musical underground, and it has made visible the history of women in jazz. It also featured female personalities who turned gender norms on their heads and challenged the male-dominated structures of the music business through their own networking and self-determination. Female to Empower is never content with historical-documentary retrospectives, but links filmic content with the entire musical spectrum of female creativity in the contemporary music business. Conversations with female artists and contemporary witnesses place the live concerts and films in a theoretical context and open up a dialogue with the audience.

In its third edition, Female to Empower is dedicated to musical improvisation as an instrument of female emancipation. What influence has improvisation had on the artistic and social emancipation of female musicians over the last five decades? What freedom was female musicians able to create for themselves through improvised music in order to develop their own sound and their own forms of collaboration? And what structural deficiencies and exclusions persist to this day? What approaches to solving them can be found?

In order to paint as comprehensive a picture as possible, the festival brings together female musicians, all-female bands and network activists from different generations and a wide variety of musical milieus: Free jazz, experimental improvised music, punk and world music will be discussed and analysed from a female perspective in panels and talks. The spoken contributions will be complemented by live concerts and a documentary film programme that delves deep into the biographies and working worlds of selected female musicians.

Detailed programme information coming soon

A project by silent green Film Feld Forschung gGmbH.
Funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.