How Not to Remember Our Bodies

Lucie Rosenfeldová / Czech Republic / 2025 / World Premiere / 16 min.

synopsis

A collage of excerpts from Czechoslovak television educational programmes from the 1970s and 1980s devoted to the artificial termination of pregnancy is accompanied by an urgent voice-over reflecting on what really shapes the history of abortion: is it the idea of self- ownership and freedom, the development of medical technologies, state reproductive policy, or market logic? The film paints a complex picture of the reproductive history of socialist Czechoslovakia, in which media representations of abortion—so different from the rhetoric surrounding the feminist pro-choice movement in the US—are transcribed into intimate bodily experience.

“We control our bodies. We control bodies. What is ‘we’ when we say ‘ours’? Touch the skin. On my own skin, I discover that I am thousands of others, not my own skin.”

biography

Lucie Rosenfeldová (born 1986) is an artist and educator based in Prague. Her work focuses on the creation of experimental documentaries based on artistic research. Through her films, she explores the changing relationship between representation and the human body, questions of embodied memory, and its scientific and artistic comprehensibility. Her works have been presented at numerous international and domestic screenings and exhibitions. In 2016, she won the main prize of Other Visions competition at the PAF Olomouc festival. Her films Concurrent Hopes (2015), Technology of the Self-Touching of the Eye (2021, with Matěj Pavlík), and Wombs & Brains (2022) were screened at Ji.hlava IDFF.