Dragging the Archive: A Club Des Femmes Messyfesto Available to Purchase

This is Club Des Femmes’s messyfesto, in which we propose that learning about radicalism and resistance can happen not through academia but rather through collective experience of watching films together in the dual contextualization of a cinema and a conversation. Club Des Femmes is a queer feminist film curation collective that has been programming at independent venues across London (and beyond) since 2007. Our messyfesto draws primarily on our activities, in person and online, since the beginning of the COVID pandemic in March 2020. It is a polyphonic and eclectic record of the events we curated in that period, from our webzine Culture Club, through the 2020 online weekender Between Us We Have Everything We Need, and then our return to cinemas for live events at the Rio Cinema in London. First, the epic summer 2021 Lesbian Camp: Yes It’s F**cking Political weekender, and most recently, the 2022 screening of Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform (1932).