“I am still moved and overwhelmed. I find it difficult to speak… I must say that in the last few years, it has rarely happened that I get to see a film so beautiful and so moving.”
 
These were the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini after a screening of Femmes femmes at the Venice Biennale in 1974. Pasolini was so enamoured of the film that he hired its two lead actors, Hélène Surgère and Sonia Saviange, for his next project, Salò.
 
Femmes femmes depicts the lives of two middle-aged, out of work actresses who share a flat in Paris. Amid money troubles, alcoholism, nostalgia and boredom, they turn their lives into a kind of eccentric performance, staging miniature dramas for each other, breaking into song, and making bizarre charades out of their interactions with the outside world.
 
The first film to unite many of the cast and crew who would go on to work on several Diagonale productions, Femmes femmes is the key work in the company’s prehistory. A strange, funny and sad set of variations on the desire to create fiction in the face of misery, it set the tone for much of Diagonale’s output.
 
This screening will be introduced by Pierre Eugène, author of Exercices de relecture: Serge Daney, 1962–1982 and member of the editorial board of Cahiers du cinéma, who is currently writing a book about Femmes femmes.