Film/Showcasing the voices of women onscreen
By James Walkowiak
Still from Granaz Moussavi’s My Tehran for Sale (2009). Still courtesy of the IWFF.

Poster from Paola Mendoza and Gloria La Morte’s Entre Nos (2009); still from Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide (2005). Poster and still courtesy of the IWFF.
Buffalo cinephiles should think about clearing their Thursday evening social calendars ’til springtime, and it has nothing to do with another bad Hollywood blockbuster. The fifteenth annual International Women’s Film Festival, kicking off at the Market Arcade on February 17, and running for six consecutive Thursdays, gives film lovers from Western New York a rare chance to see some authentically underground films from all over the world.

The IWFF, which is sponsored by UB’s Gender Institute, consists mostly of little-known films made by un- or underfunded independent women filmmakers. Festival programmer Ruth Goldman, in her second year at the helm, says she likes to cast as wide a net as possible when scheduling the festival. “I believe the festival should provide viewers with the opportunity to see films by women that they would not otherwise have the opportunity to see in a theater,” Goldman says. (The completed IWFF schedule can be found at the Gender Institute’s website: genderin.buffalo.edu.)

Although most mainstream moviegoers will not recognize the filmmakers in the lineup, Goldman, who is an Adjunct Faculty in the department of Media Study and a documentary filmmaker herself, says the point of the festival is not to give viewers something they are comfortable with. Instead, the festival should make viewers uncomfortable, it should make them think, and it should introduce them to new ways of seeing the movies. “As a programmer and educator,” Goldman says, “my intent is to provoke, in the best possible spirit of the word.”

One film that promises to provoke and challenge viewers is Oxhide (2005), a film by twenty-three-year-old first-time director Jiayin Liu. The film is made up entirely of twenty-three stationary shots of Liu’s cramped family home in Beijing. The characters, played by Liu and her parents, sometimes fill the entire screen with only a portion of their bodies, while other times they move out of the frame completely, leaving only their disembodied voices to fill the fifty-square-foot space. Twenty years ago, a movie like Oxhide couldn’t exist. But now that virtually everyone has access to high quality and relatively inexpensive digital video cameras, any woman can make a movie, and, more importantly, she can film it anywhere, even in the most politically oppressive circumstances.

Take, for instance, Granaz Moussavi’s My Tehran for Sale (2009), another film that will shock and thrill festival-goers. Using a nonlinear narrative, the film tells the story of an actress who goes underground to evade the oppressive Iranian authorities before eventually seeking out asylum in Australia. The film is “underground” in the truest sense; its story is semi-autobiographical, but its settings—in subterranean raves and concert halls—are very real. Although My Tehran for Sale is stylistically more challenging than The Apple (1998), an Iranian film from last year’s IWFF about women who become prisoners in their own home, Moussavi’s film is just as likely to elicit gasps from the audience.

Still (above) from Emily Hubley’s Her Grandmother’s Gift (1995); still (below) from Meredith Holch’s Neighbors (2009). Chautauqua Institution photos courtesy of WNED; film stills courtesy of the IWFF.
As an added treat to festival-goers, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center will co-program a visit from Emily Hubley, an American animation filmmaker whose visit will be coordinated with a screening of her animated experimental narrative feature, The Toe Tactic (2008). Hubley may be most widely known for designing and producing the animation sequence in Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). Another Hallwalls-co-programmed screening will be the acclaimed documentary !Women Art Revolution, a recent Toronto International Film Festival selection.

Because audiences responded so positively to last year’s animated shorts, Goldman has broadened her survey of the genre this year. One film that should make for a captivating postviewing discussion is Neighbors (2009). Directed by Meredith Holch, Neighbors is an animated documentary short about undocumented farm workers in Vermont who, due to the threat of deportation, are literally trapped in their homes. Goldman likens Holch’s style to “puppetry in animation form.”

And the opening film is one of the most acclaimed of the 1990s, a modern classic that’s still being discovered: Sally Potter’s Orlando. Goldman says Potter’s “fascinating interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s playful, gender-bending novel will be shown in 35mm. It’s a gorgeous film, and especially apropos for contemporary discussions of gender as sociohistorical construct. It’s sure to provoke an interesting post-film discussion.”

Although mainstream viewers may be unfamiliar with the subject matter of many of these films, Goldman tries to contextualize each one by providing an introduction prior to the screening. Sometimes she even invites an expert from a particular field to talk about the film’s content. After the screening, audience members, including students from Goldman’s advanced undergraduate and graduate class called “Gender & Film,” engage in a rousing discussion of what they just watched.

Although the IWFF doesn’t have an overarching theme, several films tangle with similar issues, including immigrant identity and artistic freedom. A number of films have something else in common: most were shot on video, not on 35mm, a development that Goldman can’t help but feel conflicted about. “On the one hand,” she says, “I’m sad because 35mm is so incredibly beautiful, but on the other hand this gives me a unique opportunity as a programmer.”

One opportunity Goldman has seized upon is in using the IWFF to showcase a number of short films. Women filmmakers don’t receive nearly as much funding and distribution support as their male colleagues, even in the United States; therefore, many women choose to make “shorts,” which are cheaper to produce and easier to self-distribute. Goldman plans to screen a short film before each of the feature-length films as a way of introducing audiences to a wider range of female voices.

A final note: In addition to the Thursday screenings at the Market Arcade Theater, Squeaky Wheel is co-programming a selection of short experimental films and videos by women from the Middle East and North Africa called “Resistances III.” The program will screen at Squeaky Wheel on March 9.

Check out the complete IWFF programming schedule on the Gender Institute’s website: genderin.buffalo.edu


James Walkowiak is doing his part for the “digital revolution,” thanks to the Flip video camera his girlfriend got him for his birthday.


SUBSCRIBE NOW

Back to the Table of Contents

Back to Top