We Want Roses Too (Vogliamo anche le rose)

Intriguing in its form, fascinating in its content, this history of women’s experience in post-war Italy is a collage of archive footage, artful new animated inserts and personal testimonies. Given the country’s backbone of Catholic conservatism, the battle for the right to contraception, divorce and abortion was a prolonged struggle, with much pain and repression along the way for women trapped by reactionary attitudes. Most startling here is the terrifying account of undergoing a secret abortion in the mid-’70s, though the contemporaneous footage of riot police laying into feminist protestors is pretty startling too. A dusting of wry humour seasons the film’s understandable sense of anger and ultimate vindication.