Gabrielle GoliathLago di Como (Personal Accounts), 2024
Filmed in Como (2024)
Lake Como is beautiful, wealthy people retire there. It’s the north Italian idyll: lakes, mountains, villas, wine, food, lifestyle. It is also a place of fugitive arrivals and departures - of tentative community, precarious labour and unbelonging, And, cutting across its differential hierarchies (of race, culture, privilege and legal status), patriarchy draws a fault line, marking feminised lives as available to violence and subjecting survivors to (further) social and political invalidation. Every year, the Como branch of Telefona Donna responds to over 250 new cases of gendered violence and sexual assault, offering psycho-social support, legal counsel and love to women in distress. Shared in this cycle of 'Personal Accounts' are the difficulties, hopes and asserted life practices of nine survivors: artists, writers, cleaners, mothers, entrepreneurs. For some this is home, for others yet another making of it, having arrived in Lombardy (for so many reasons) from Senegal, Morocco, Brazil, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Albania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Connecting this tight Telefona Donna family - across their many differences - is not the common bind and social circumscription of ‘victimhood’, but the nourishment, affection, solidarity and joy through which they exceed it. Como is beautiful - made beautiful in these quotidian offerings of arrival, transition, home-making and repair: in Zohra’s prayers, in Diarra’s bar, in Ecaterina’s photo book, and in the fragile remains of what these personal accounts choose to reveal and withhold.
