The Mini Film Festival Donne di Mafia, having a voice, returns for its fourth year at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London on 16 - 17 March 2024.
The Festival focuses on the role, presence, and agency of women in Italian mafias, which was part of a research project funded by a Leverhulme Major Fellowship awarded by the Leverhulme Trust in 2018.
Women in Italian mafias are often portrayed as helpless victims, ignorant by-standers, or passive protagonists. However, new research in the field emphasises their more complex existence within the criminal underworld, showing how ‘women are an integral part of these [crime] groups with their own agency and their own criminal knowledge and capacity for violence’. Mafias, like other organised crime groups, need women to survive and flourish. Behind the mafia male brand, women are crucial as partners-in-crime and without them, it is unclear if mafias would survive. As one former mafia woman once explained ‘there are many women […], there are many types of women […], there are women who want to play the part of men’ (Allum, 2016). Organised crime and Italian mafias are more female than we want to think or accept: è femmina.
Organised by CinemaItaliaUK and sponsored by the University of Bath.
