_UNDERSCORE

The Female Age

Ageing Women in 21^st Century Eastern European Cinema

by Dr. Asja Makarević, Drd. Boglárka Angéla Farkas  and Dr. Andrea Virginás

In her seminal 2006 essay “Performing Age, Performing Gender,” Kathleen Woodward described six types of age:

Chronological age refers to the number of years a person has lived. Biological or functional age refers to the state of a person’s physical capacities. (…) Social age refers to the meanings that a society accords to different categories of age. (…) Like social age, cultural age refers to the meanings or values that a culture assigns to different people in terms of age, but here status and power are crucial. (…) Psychological age refers to a person’s state of mind in terms of age. (…) Finally, by statistical age I mean predictions concerning age based on large data sets. (2006, 183, emphasis in the original)

All these forms of age have been undergoing profound change(s). Human beings today have the prospect of attaining the highest values in terms of the most objective age-forms, chronological and statistical age, since such measures are taken. With chronological age possibilities and/or life expectancy, and statistical age both showing increase in the recent past, but also as projected in the (near) future (life expectancy sitting at an EU-average of 81.4 years for babies born in 2023 within the Union [Eurostat 2025]), state institutions and NGOs have been engaged in trying to understand the consequences of these processes for the other types of age defined by Woodward.

A phenomenon indeed experienced by all – both human and non-human, organic and non-organic – ageing appears to be taking a definitive role in the playout of the 21^st century: reshaping families, policies, economies, social service systems, and cultural products. According to the United Nations, “[b]y 2080, people aged 65 and over will outnumber children under 18” (United Nations n.d.) in the global context, with (population) ageing being arguably the most pertinent issue in Europe, which is often regarded as the ‘greying continent’. A 2025 policy brief on Europe’s ageing challenges further emphasizes that “[b]etween 2023 and 2050, Eastern and Southern EU countries will face the sharpest declines because of both natural population decrease and limited net inward migration,” while “Northern and Western countries could see population growth driven by higher migration” (Pinkus and Ruer 2025, 1). This geographical divide – at least partially connected to historical divides, including that of the Iron Curtain – across European countries poses radically different challenges to the Western and Northern parts of the continent, possibly overwhelmed by outward population growth, and to the Eastern and Southern parts, threatened by mass depopulation, the shrinkage of working-age adults, and the overload of social service systems.

Cinema is one such culturally prestigious institution in which these changes can be observed on multiple levels. Josephine Dolan’s impactful 2017 monograph explored the “triple silvering” articulated through the ageing of the stars, the ageing of audiences, and the (topic of) ageing palpable in the filmic narratives. Indeed, in the last decade(s), “scholarly attention to the perceived ‘greying’ of mainstream cinema has gathered momentum” (Jermyn 2014, 108). Itself a greying medium, cinema persists in an overall greying social context, and on occasions collaborates with youth cultures in order to survive. Cinema battles with gender gaps and non/offers ageing roles above 50, being profoundly affected by its own ‘greying’; but it is also capable of culturally representing and redefining what ageing means. Film may address the ageing (female) subject to articulate a social critique – be that the retired, scammed language teacher in Bulgarian BLAGA’S LESSONS or the single beekeeper outsmarted by greedy fellows in Macedonian HONEYLAND, both creations highlighting the failures of the post-transitional era and the inhumanity of a capitalist society; or the ‘petro-menopausal’ (Waade and Leyda 2022) ‘eco-warrior’ females in Polish SPOOR and Ukrainian THE GATEWAY, who connect the topic of ageing with ecocriticism (Virginás 2025, 85-102). From the standpoint of national cinemas, the ageing (female) subject may be the shareholder of collective history and cultural trauma, repositioning older adults – either in the form of fiction, see Hungarian MOM AND OTHER LOONIES IN THE FAMILY, or that of documentary, see Serbian titles such as THE ECLIPSE or LANDSCAPES OF RESISTANCE, and Hungarian THE EUPHORIA OF BEING – as the living and breathing testimonies of history and national identity.

But what does ‘being old’ mean? From when on is one considered ‘old’? An important marker, which sets a line of division between young and old, has to do with the idea of decline, loss, an irreversible molecular change, but also, importantly, with the notion of unproductivity as perceived, judged, checked and regulated from within the neoliberal capitalist system. This cultural gerontological framework may be expanded to the notion of the “master narrative of decline” as problematised by Margaret M. Gullette (2004); its counter concept of “successful ageing” by John Rowe and Robert Louis Kahn (1987); and by the possible alternatives to these dominant poles of thinking about the old age: “feminist ageing” as thematized, again, by Kathleen Woodward (1999), and “ageing masculinity” by Tony Tracy and Michaela Schrage-Früh (2023), among others. These nuances have been adequately captured by Lawton’s model of “person-environment fit” (1989) which highlights how “a balance between environmental demands and personal skills is necessary for one to feel competent and be judged as competent by others,” with “environments grow[ing] increasingly important as people age, serving to facilitate autonomy and well-being or, alternatively, placing barriers between individuals and their competent execution of daily life” (Baltes and Carstensen 1999, 212). As a matter of fact, all of the films included in this edition of the _UNDERSCORE program may be seen as actualising the “person-environment fit model” while depicting ageing women with the tools of Eastern European Cinema: see the ‘grandmotherly’ woman who struggles with the loneliness of her environment in the Latvian stop-motion animation ALL MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD; the mothers who overstep their bourgeois class boundaries in Romanian CHILD’S POSE or Georgian SCARY MOTHER; or the daughter who ventures into sex clubs in Romanian TOUCH ME NOT, all while searching for “the environment” that fits her post-menopause “person”.

This _UNDERSCORE selection focuses on gendered possibilities of action hitherto biologically open to those with female sexual, reproductive organs; emphasizing what Kathleen Woodward, citing Nancy Chodorow, so beautifully describes in terms of the “vertical relation between women” (Woodward 1995, 87), being born into successive generations; and pointing to the insights that Eastern European, often small national cinemas – like the Bulgarian, the Georgian, the Hungarian, the Latvian, the Macedonian, the Romanian, or Serbian ones represented in the screening program – might add to the panorama. The generational process of granddaughters, daughters and grandmothers is far from being represented as an idyllic interlinking. As a matter of fact, a colourful palette opens up and our suggestion has been to describe and theorize it from that element of the chain that we may name the ageing, or old(er) adult woman, in her connection with the previous two generations: be that an explicit, biological or genetic lineage; or else a symbolic, adopted connection of intellectual relatedness; and finally, case(s) of the grandmother figure’s lack or erasure figuratively represented as what may be described in terms of ‘mad rebels’ or ‘intellectual conundrums’.

According to their positioning in time, the protagonists of Ageing Women in 21^st Century Eastern European Film are entering middle age, or have passed to the second, non-reproductive part of the female life trajectory, and their complex, above-described linkages to actual, hypothetical, imaginary or symbolical offspring constitute a powerful method by which to represent female existence modulated by the ageing process. Rebellious and heroic, these female characters are therefore united also thanks to their bordering on the menopausal 50 as for their age. Marginalised from a social perspective, they often earn little, or do not even have regular personal income, their status is diminished, and their recognition might come from the audience of these films, but they evidently do not get the diegetic world’s attention and approval – as a matter of fact, the opposite is the case. In extreme cases, they are stigmatized, rejected, laughed at by those who enter into socially mediated contacts with them, making us therefore face the possible and complex consequences of women living longer than ever before, with their ageing selves and bodies slowly transferring into chronological and statistical aging after 65, a phenomenon that is happening at a bigger scale than ever before in human history.

Thanks to the outer signifiers described above, one can speak about the pervasive influence of the menopausal 50 years of age in a context theorised as the “Global East” –  “too rich to be a proper part of the South, but too poor to be a part of the North . . . too powerful to be periphery, but too weak to be the centre” (Müller 2020, 735-73) – and which exposes a real-world social phenomenon. Namely, how 21^st-century female existence is being split into two distinct, and even equal phases, given the growth of human lifespan – one important factor in contemporary demographic ageing. The showcased ‘Global Eastern’ heroines’ biological, functional and psychological age-constructions are impacted by their individual, or collectively experienced hardships, while social and cultural age-assignments by their surroundings are in great opposition to their devised solutions to ageing as women. Polish 2018 Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s fascinating, ageing female eco-warrior protagonist in her 2007 ecological noir novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, should be mentioned here as a literary pre-image, too. The English teacher retiring to the materially deprived yet idyllic mountain region on the Polish-Czech border zone, and the mystical yet fully down-to-earth campaign she leads against the male political elite killing the animals in aggressive hunting parties, was adapted to the screen by Agnieszka Holland in the 2018 SPOOR. Holland’ s film synthesizes all the described elements of (post-)menopausal ageing, which further engenders eco-activism within the Anthropocene framework.

Back in her 2003 article, Woodward urged us “to change the affect script for older people in our culture,” adding that to do so, our greatest opportunity lies in “telling stories” (2003, 64). More than 20 years later, our selection shall reflect on how this mission is addressed and carried out in the contemporary cinemas of the “Other Europe” (Iordanova 2003), offering a special focus on ageing femininities – both on-screen and off-screen. We believe that narrative films translate complex socio-political issues into memorable experiences. They help shape the perception of audiences in terms of what is deemed relevant and representable. We are convinced that audiovisual narratives, like the ones presented in our film programme, can engage the audiences, which cut across differences of race, class and gender, and create a needed forum for inter-generational interaction and exchange.

© European Film Academy 2026
UNDERSCORE is an online focus programme of the European Film Academy, curated exclusively for Academy members and taking place on the Academy VOD platform. In co–operation with varying partners, additional elements of the programme can be visited on external platforms and are therefore accessible to a wider audience interested in European films.
Programme co-ordination – Pascal Edelmann
Community building – Ana López Vazquez
Editorial concept – Matthijs Wouter Knol