Ever since their creation, film festivals have worked to forge an international position by distributing advertising and informative materials outside their borders. For years, the exchange of catalogues with their counterparts was largely a matter of trade and diplomatic interests. That said, on occasions they have also served as a tool for conveying knowledge and building collaborative networks.

The San Sebastian Film Festival archive catalogue lists a plethora of these mechanisms: dating back to at least 1987, the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival would send its handbills to San Sebastian, in turn requesting information on the films produced by women in the country. The result of this exchange saw the ground-breaking participation in the French event of the first feature film directed by a female Basque filmmaker: having premiered in the Zabaltegi section, Ana Díez went on to compete with her film Ander eta Yul (1988) in the official selection of the eleventh Créteil Festival, also marking the first time that the Basque language had been heard on the screens of the French city.

The Créteil International Women’s Film Festival, founded in 1979 by professor Jackie Buet and Elisabeth Tréhard, at that time director of the Les Gémeaux cultural action centre, had been created to overcome the sparse figures of participation by women in the film industry, at the dawn of a despairingly narrow international context when it came to the appearance of women in programmes. Exploring the initiatives under way in other places, they learned that New York had held the first international festival of films by women in 1972 and that a union going by the name of Women in Film was supporting film production by means of partnerships and sponsorships. The only actions taken in the France of the day were those of the Musidora Association which, in 1974, had organised the first major gathering of films made by women at the Musée d’Art Moderne. The members of that feminist film group would join the San Sebastian Women’s Association in an advisory capacity on the programme of the first season of films made by women at the San Sebastian Festival in 1978, a year before Créteil came to be.

As can be seen in the handbill for the 1989 edition of the Créteil Festival, apart from Ana Díez and other competing names including those of Ulrike Ottinger, Barbara Trent and María Novaro, the programme featured two areas dedicated to the performances of Delphine Seyrig and Liliana Cavani – who had participated in the San Sebastian Festival’s II International Meeting of Film Schools in 1961 with her short film La Battaglia – and a season dedicated to the films of the diaspora, going by the name of Images of Black Women, presented by Angela Davis, a leading light in the North American civil rights movement.