Women's Epistolary Cinema. Exploring Female Alterities: Epistolary Films and Epistolary Essay Films

This article aims to analyse female authorship in the materialisations of contemporary epistolary cinema, focusing on epistolary films and epistolary essay films. The works of various filmmakers are essential to understand the evolution of this enunciation device and the exploration of female alterities materialised through it. Women filmmakers epistolary practices delve into the exploration of intimate space, authorial vindication, epistolary materiality, intersubjectivity and cinematic thinking to create diverse experiences of female alterity, developing this postmodern paradigm inherent in epistolary device. Since Chantal Akerman started the practice of the epistolary film with News from Home (1977), other women filmmakers have developed this cinematic form. The reading of a personal correspondence allows the exploration of female intimate alterities –Measures of Distance (1988), Punto impropio (2015), A Minha Avó Trelotótó (2018). Besides, the epistolary film is fictionalised, displacing it to the intellectual space –From Hetty to Nancy (1997), Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009). Other people’s real correspondence is also instrumentalised to create their recreations and representations, vindicating female alterities both socially and personally –Letter #69 (2016), The Dreamed Ones (2016). Finally, women filmmakers addressed the cinematic form of the essay film –Letters from Panduranga (2015), Correspôndencias (2016).