EQZE restores "Inês", Delphine Seyrig's first activist video

Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola has restored Inês, the first activist video filmed by the French-American actress and filmmaker Delphine Seyrig in 1974. The film follows the case of Inês Etienne Romeu (1942-2015), a Brazilian activist opposed to the military dictatorship, who was kidnapped in 1971, tortured and raped in prison and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1972. To protest Etienne Romeu's imprisonment and as a gesture of support, Seyrig made this video in collaboration with the Brazilian actress Norma Bengell. Etienne Romeu was released in 1979.

Inês combines a reenactment of Etienne Romeu’s imprisonment and the violence she suffered with a plea for her release. The film forms part of an international campaign spearheaded by a network of feminist activists and represents a milestone in Seyrig's political and cinematic career. The following year, alongside Carole Roussopoulos and Ioana Wieder, she founded the feminist video collective Les Insoumuses.

The restored film will première at Cinéma du réel in Paris on 27 March, within the Classic Documentary Film Rendez-Vous section. It will be presented by Nicole Fernández Ferrer, chair of the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, and Amanda Soares, EQZE Film Preservation Studies Master’s graduate and head of the film's restoration.

The restoration

The film was originally recorded on 1/2-inch EIAJ tape, and in 2006 the material was transferred to Digital Betacam. During the restoration project, both formats were digitised and the image from the original tape was combined with the sound from the Betacam. The image was digitally restored to reduce the damage caused by the ageing of the tape—mainly localised image loss and variations in light and contrast levels—while at the same time preserving a certain degree of signal instability at the edges and noise at the bottom, both of which are inherent to the original material. The sound was processed to improve intelligibility without altering the recording's characteristics.

The restoration work was carried out in the laboratories of EQZE in collaboration with the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, an institution that Seyrig herself co-founded in 1982 to preserve films made by women.