Home Movies celebrates women in sports through archival films

For International Women's Day on March 8, Home Movies – National Archive of Family Films in Bologna presents a selection of amateur and family film fragments from the 1920s to the 1970s, highlighting women's relationship with sport. The footage, accompanied by piano, shows women on beaches, in stadiums, on athletic tracks, skating rinks, and tennis courts, illustrating how sport served as a space for women to experiment with a new, strong, and free subjectivity. Giulia Simi of Home Movies comments on the significance of sport in women's emancipation. The videos are part of the new Sport and Games section of Memoryscapes – Private Cinema Online, a project that digitizes and makes accessible over two thousand clips from private films preserved by the Bologna archive. The initiative involved research, selection, description, digitization, and editing of amateur films from the 1920s to the 1970s. The article notes that at the last Winter Olympics, 10 of Italy's 19 medals were won by women, yet sport remains a male-dominated field in media coverage.