MARINA GENOVESE

Ten years ago, on August 19th 2008, after a heroic struggle, conducted with courage and joy until its last moment, our beloved friend Marina Genovese left us. For us who worked with her for over twenty years, her untimely passing represented not only a personal loss, but also a political pause time.

In this page, we wish to commemorate the public Marina, even if her private life has always been inextricably linked to her politic passion. Marina gave her whole life to women, from militant feminism in the Liberation Movement of Women (MLD) to the separatist lesbianism. Full of ideas and projects, for years she has not granted herself any activity if not inside Visibilia Association and Immaginaria Film Festival.

Politics was her greatest passion, she was capable of deep and far-sighted analyses. In the early Nineties, she was the first who proposed to renew the ties with the leftist Institutions, obtaining what you could reasonably expect during those years. She had no problems in dealing with Mayors and Councilors, thanks to the force of her proposals and her natural propensity to human relationships. She was always independent from political parties and from traditional power rules. She struggled by any means to remember the basic principles of a lesbian ethic still to be invented. She thought that the relationship with Women Movements should have been valued again, in a period in which achievements like abortion rights were challenged by Center-Right Parties.

But, first of all, she thought that lesbian women should prefer female thought to homologation and leveling on a certain LGBT policy and that female thought was the only point from which take flight to create a really different world.

Let’s close these few lines recalling the main principles in her politic life. First of all, her huge interest in women dignity and freedom, her way of taking care of Immaginaria, since its first edition in 1993. She used to tell “I want to see lesbian women in beautiful public places, the same of everyone else. Stop with the wooden benches and peeling walls we have been happy with for years. This kind of things offend us more than others can do “. Secondly, the belief that all together we could create a different world, different from the one we go on seeing every day around us.
Thanks, Marina. Forever. All the new editions of the Festival are dedicated to you.