Rir para não Chorar: Mulheres e Humor no Cinema

There are gestures that transform the body completely: laughing is one of them. By inscribing joy on a physical and vital plane, laughter suspends reality, if only momentarily — an experience not unlike that of watching a film.

In a time marked by a growing sense of tragedy, Laughing So We Don’t Cry brings renewed urgency to women’s humour as both aesthetic strategy and a political gesture. The programme explores forms of feminist comedy that arise from discomfort, deviation, excess, and refusal, linking laughter to critique, pleasure to consciousness, and humour to resistance. Here, laughter is less a consolation than a tactic: a way of returning the gaze, bending the norm, and reclaiming imagination as a site of power.

The programme traces a polyphonic, discontinuous, and open genealogy of artists and filmmakers who, over more than a century, have chosen to make people laugh and have redefined what humour can be. From slapstick and comic physicality to sarcasm, from madness and satire to the grotesque and irony, the selection foregrounds humour as a tool for reshaping the world.

Spanning feature films and shorter works, Laughing So We Don’t Cry highlights practices that use comedy to question dominant narratives, cinematic hierarchies, and social expectations. In the realm of feature filmmaking — historically constrained by rigid structures of authorship and production largely impermeable to women filmmakers — the programme focuses exclusively on films directed by women, many of which are rarely screened in cinemas.

Positioned at the intersection of feminist thought, moving-image practice, and embodied experience, Laughing So We Don’t Cry proposes humour as a shared language of resistance — one that transforms vulnerability into force, and laughter into a collective, unruly act.

In Golden Eighties, Chantal Akerman reinvents the musical within the banal setting of a shopping centre, where exuberant songs unfold alongside romantic frustrations and daily routine. The apparent lightness is deceptive: beneath the colourful choreography lie solitude, memory, and unreciprocated desire. With Daisies, Věra Chytilová pushes anarchy to its limit. Two protagonists reject morality, labour, and narrative continuity, embracing excess as an act of rupture. Laughter emerges from the collapse of rules — and within that collapse, space opens to imagine other possible lives and identities. Ana Carolina’s Mar de Rosas similarly constructs a spiral of chaos in which family structures and social conventions dissolve into corrosive farce. Satire permeates the film’s very form, reminding us that comedy can be both violent and liberating.

The teen romantic comedy is reconfigured in Clueless and Party Girl, where the figure of the “frivolous girl” is recast as a thinking, contradictory subject in constant reinvention. Rather than softening the protagonists, humour sharpens their impeccably painted nails. Through pop culture, fashion, and music, these films — contemporaneous yet produced at opposite ends of the American film industry — lay bare the class codes, gender norms, and the growing cult of capitalism shaping a certain 1990s middle-class imaginary. In But I'm a Cheerleader, Jamie Babbit pushes camp to its political limit, satirising so-called “conversion” therapies and transforming laughter into an explicit gesture of queer insubordination.

This cinema is not concerned solely with women and their lives. Lina Wertmüller demonstrates that there is room for male protagonists — provided they are willing to enter into crisis. In Pasqualino settebellezze, humour enters a disquieting ethical territory, where comedy skirts the abyss and compels us to ask what it still means to laugh in the face of horror. The film tests the limits of acceptability, revealing laughter as deeply ambivalent: at times innocent, at times complicit. By contrast, Naoko Ogigami’s Kamome Diner operates on an intimate, everyday scale. A small Japanese restaurant in Helsinki becomes a gathering place for the lonely and the eccentric, where joy emerges from attentiveness, quiet peculiarity, and care. The film thus foregrounds another key axis of the programme: friendship and empathy — not only between women, but also between men, as exemplified by Sarah Maldoror's Un dessert pour Constance.

It is precisely from this relational dimension that the latter film extends its critical gesture, demonstrating how humour can unsettle regimes of representation. Martine Syms' The African Desperate shares this same drive towards destabilisation, engaging contemporary visual culture with biting wit and formal precision to expose processes of racialisation, gendered performance, and social codification. Decades earlier, Edith Carlmar articulated a similarly incisive alliance between comedy and critique in Lend Me Your Wife. Through a distinctive cinematic device, the film dismantles normative gender roles and class hierarchies, affirming humour as a means of disruption across historical and cultural contexts.

In the realm of short films and artists’ films, the selection embraces an even more explicit logic of plurality and dialogue, with many works presented alongside feature films. Acting as counterpoints, each of these pieces amplifies or refracts ideas of its paired film — whether through the (literal) collapse staged by Salomé Lamas, Michel Auder's fragmentary visions of New York, or the diasporic lives portrayed by Fanta Sylla. Within this context, and in light of the more porous modes of creation and production that characterise short-form and artists’ cinema, the programme also opens itself to works by male artists in which the female gaze is decisive. Here, the logic of the razor-sharp idea becomes particularly evident: films such as Doll Clothes, Three Instagram Models Have a Picnic, Pescados, That Fertile Feeling, or Clotilde operate on a scale where humour is swift, incisive, and maximally effective.

The programme also includes Women, Lies and Videotape, a session that brings together works by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Amalia Ulman and the collective Les Insoumuses, of which Delphine Seyrig was a member. Across diverse languages — from television parody to digital performance — these films stage a forceful counter-offensive against the ways women are represented, constructed, and imagined by society. Completing this constellation is Tohé Commaret: A Cinema of Complicity, in which the invited artist presents two works in the Sala-Filme, exploring the interstices of image technologies through spaces of friction, collaboration, and critical joy.

From the USA to Japan, from Brazil to Central Europe, geographical and cultural diversity runs throughout the programme, even if drawn on an imperfect map, fully aware of inequalities in access to production and circulation — and of the fact that the ability to laugh is itself a privilege. Within this complexity of experiences and life stories, shared thematic axes emerge: the body, friendship, desire, dissent. The characters stumble, sing out of tune, exaggerate; they laugh at others and themselves, affirming the power of failure and error.

Laughing so we don’t cry, yes — but also laughing to disobey, to rewrite, to look directly ahead. In the darkness of the cinema, shared laughter turns into thought. And thought, at times, bursts back into laughter.