TRIÁZS – experimental film and community performance

Mp4 30’46”

Stereo Act, Budapest

Photos: 3. Performance Now! Festival @school_of_disobedience Photo: Pocsai Martina | 2025

9 February 2025

About the film:

Triage is the medical practice of ranking patients according to their illness and deciding the order in which they should be treated according to the severity of their condition. In other words, diseases are ranked in relation to each other. The practice aims to minimise the possibility of irreversible processes leading to death and to give patients a better chance of survival.

Society can be healthy if women have the same opportunities and chances as men.

The film is a film sequel consisting of three short films based on three texts written by men. These texts have been rewritten to varying degrees and placed in a new context in order to give them new meaning for women’s situation.  Thus, social hierarchy and the subordinate role of women in it, self-colonisation and the production of desire became our themes.

In doing so, we have also put powerful male writers in a position to care about women’s situation, setting an example for other powerful male writers who are oblivious to the problems of gender inequality.

The titles of the three parts of the film and the sources of the appropriated and adapted texts are:

In the Pyramyd – MIKLÓS ERDÉLY – IN THE PYRAMYD

Global Deficit – ALEXANDER KIOSSEV: – NOTES ON SELF-COLONIZING CULTURE

Anatomy of Desire – GILLES DELEUZE – FELIX GUATTARI: WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

Community performance:

We start the screening of our 30-minute experimental film with a mock scene: the presenters welcome the audience to the Simon Jolán Association’s community event, the first feminist public health meeting.

Our aim is to take feminist discourse to a new level that skinheads and fashion feminists no longer understand.  We want to raise the stakes and bring feminist philosophy into the public discourse, as opposed to trends that relegate women to the level of the blonde women joke.

We also need a change in the level of public discourse because for more than 30 years we have achieved nothing by repeating obvious facts such as:

– women are in a minority position in the patriarchy,

– they have more and higher degrees and qualifications, but much lower incomes than men,

– they suffer many forms of violence, from domestic violence to violence in the workplace to structural violence

– they are forced into prostitution in large numbers,

– modern-day slavery exists, of which 87% of the victims are women,

– there are no women in leadership positions in significant numbers, and especially women raising their children alone

To this end, we made a three-part short film with English subtitles, which is the starting point of our event.

After watching the film, we will have a creative reflection on what we saw in the film. To do this, the audience will be divided into groups and the groups will be given instructions on what to do. In the third part of our event, the creation will be replaced by an academic discussion. This will test the impact of our proposals for a new, higher level of feminist public discourse. On the other hand, the audience can also use this language to try to define the problems women suffer from.  We will also ask them to rank the urgency of addressing these problems and to collect suggestions on the most appropriate way to address them. So it is up to the public to create the first Hungarian feminist triage.