In November 1973, a 28-year-old Norwegian filmmaker named Vibeke Løkkeberg took a camera crew to Berlin to document the first International Women’s Film Seminar. Fifty-two years later, that footage finally became a film, and The Long Road to the Director’s Chair opened the Berlinale’s Forum.
If you have this power to move people’s heart and brain, then you become dangerous.
A Film Buried, Then Exhumed
The story of the film is inseparable from the story of its delay. Løkkeberg shot the 1973 seminar at the old Arsenal cinema, a groundbreaking gathering organized by the German filmmakers Helke Sander and Claudia von Alemann, where, in the heady spirit of 1968 and the dawning feminist movement, women from across the industry spoke plainly about lack of opportunity, poor pay, harassment, and their hopes for fundamental change. She had traveled there to present her own Nouvelle-Vague-influenced film about abortion reform and to record the gathering. She interviewed pioneering figures, including the Women Make Movies co-founder Ariel Dougherty. Then nobody would touch it. Norway’s state broadcaster refused to buy a film whose women were so critical of the media, and the footage was shelved, then lost. The testimony she captured is unsparing: women recall being branded mad, bad, and stupid for approaching a job differently, having to prove and prove and prove themselves to be taken half as seriously, and learning that simply knowing what they wanted was treated as an aggression. It surfaced again only in 2019, when the National Library of Norway contacted a director who had long since forced herself to forget the project, telling her they had found something she might want to see. The footage was restored and finally completed five decades on, with producer Anders Tangen, premiering in black and white at the very venue where it was shot.
The Suppression Is the Argument
Here’s the stance worth drawing out, because Løkkeberg frames the long delay as a tragedy, and it is, but it is also the film’s argument, proven by its own existence. A documentary made in 1973 about women’s exclusion from cinema, then buried because no one would fund a film that criticized the media, then exhumed in 2025, is a work whose form is its content: the very forces it documents are the forces that delayed it. Released on schedule in 1974, it would have been a snapshot. Buried for fifty-two years and reopened, it becomes a time capsule that arrives to find the room barely rearranged. Løkkeberg keeps returning to the statistic that not much has changed, and the structure delivers that point with a force no argument could, since we watch women in 1973 describe barriers that current figures, only around a quarter of key film roles held by women, show still standing. The film is not a history of a solved problem but a measurement of a stalled one. The delay, in a sense, did the film’s work for it.
Why a System Was Never Built for Her
Løkkeberg’s theory of why this happens is bracing and unsentimental. The system, she argues, was never made for women, because a woman with the power to move an audience’s heart and mind is dangerous to a structure that prefers control. It is safer, she says, to let the men make the films of killing and explosion and spectacle, while women’s stories, the ones about lives kept hidden from society, go unfunded. This reframes her whole aesthetic creed, her insistence on nourishment over glamour, on films you carry home rather than films you forget, not as nostalgia but as strategy. A film capable of being buried for half a century and still landing is the proof of exactly the danger she names: it could not be allowed to circulate in its moment precisely because it would have moved people, and it can still move them now precisely because it always could. The commercial machine, in her view, prefers the opposite, films you consume and forget, ushered in and out so you never sit with anything, the cinematic equivalent of junk food. She worries especially about what this does to children, pointing to her young grandson’s games full of crashing planes and exploding robots, and argues that filmmakers now need to strip away gloss and put the message first. On the wider fight she is clear-eyed to the point of bleakness: the power, she says, is never handed to women, so it has to be taken, because politics and control always come before the human feeling that art is supposed to protect.
The Lineage She Claims
Her cinematic roots are old and deep, and she names them readily.
Italian neorealism, she says, was her real school, the tradition of De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, where simple means and untrained faces carry an overwhelming human and social weight. She adds Tarkovsky, the French New Wave and Godard’s opposition to the Hollywood factory, and Antonioni, Fellini, and Bergman as her foundation. Her own film belongs in conversation with two documentaries she does not name, both devoted to the same recovery work: Mark Cousins’s Women Make Film, a sweeping argument for the overlooked history of women directors, and Pamela B. Green’s Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, which rescues the first female filmmaker from erasure.
A Life of Going Uphill
What comes through most is a refusal to quit that has defined a six-decade career across acting, directing, and a shelf of novels (when the film system blocked her, she simply wrote books, and they were a success). She has always directed herself, finding it freeing rather than difficult, since she would rather work than wait around as an actress, and she shrugs that if Clint Eastwood can direct himself, so can she, having done it across most of her films.
To go uphill is the best thing I can do.
Being told no, she says, is the best fuel she has, the surest sign she is onto something worth doing. Her resilience traces back to being born at the end of a war, in a town bombed by the Allies, among mothers who lost children and were not permitted to speak of it, an early lesson that society splits into those who follow the line and those who risk everything by stepping outside it. She chose the second path and has stayed on it: her drama Hud went to Cannes with Terence Stamp in a leading role (he had come merely to visit the shoot on an island off Norway’s west coast, wanting only a small part, until she offered to write him the lead, which he took because the way her team worked reminded him of his young days making films in Italy), and after a long, system-imposed gap she returned with the wartime documentary Tears of Gaza. Painters paint until they die, she reasons, so why should she stop making films? Now 80, she is already extending The Long Road to the Director’s Chair into a multi-part series with her filmmaker daughter, returning to interview the surviving women from 1973 alongside their younger counterparts, refusing, fittingly, to let a film about women’s silencing be silenced. Her one piece of hard-won advice is to find a producer who truly understands you, because building a production is its own difficult craft, and without that partnership you may as well just write books.
