|
Women’s
story
Women
film directors today showcase a challenging gamut of subjects
and treatment as witnessed during an international film festival
in Kolkata recently. Shoma A. Chatterji reports
Tahmineh Milani is a well-known and controversial
filmmaker from Iran. Her film The Unwanted Woman (2005) was
the inaugural film of the Second International Women Film
Festival held in Kolkata recently. The story spans the course
of a single day and night in the lives of a couple and their
little girl. It is a road movie that charts several journeys
alongside the physical journey of leaving the home city to
reach a young widow to certain place. For the young wife Sima,
is it also a journey of discovery where she finds that her
husband has been exploiting her in every which way and she
rebels by supporting a fugitive from the law who has killed
his wife and her paramour in the heat of the moment. It is
a meaningful film with a strong closure, touched with feather-light
touches of humour in an otherwise dark story.
The Eisenstein Cine Club, Kolkata, collaborated with the International
Women Film Festival Society of India to present the weeklong
festival at Gorky Sadan to give a glimpse of works by women
directors from countries like Portugal, Argentina, Mexico,
Belgium, Russia, Spain, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Romania
and Poland. But is there a need for a separate film festival
for women directors? Festival director Shyamali Banerjee underscored
that the festival had no intention of projecting an anti-male
stance; it is rather an exploration of women behind the camera.
It seeks to release creative women in cinema from the patriarchal
tendency to ignore the contributions of women per se, which
happens in other creative fields as well.
.
The Hungarian film Fresh Air, directed by Kocsis Agnes, tells
the stark tale of a mother and daughter who share have nothing
in common except their addiction to some television programmes.
As they seat beside each other in the drawing room sofa facing
the camera (the television screen), one can feel the distance
between them. It is only when the mother (who takes care of
plush toilets for men and women in what appears to be a shopping
mall) is mugged by robbers and has to be hospitalised that
the daughter realises the depth of their love for each other.
The director has hardly used any dialogue in the film yet
does her bit with some brilliant editing that keeps time with
the pace of the action and stasis in it.
The Romanian film Rag Tale directed by Mary McGuekian uses
an experimental variation of Hollywood's fast-paced films.
It deals with the political and sexual intrigues of scandal,
one-upmanship and backstabbing in the top echelons of a newspaper
called The Rag. For a major part of its 123 minutes of footage,
the visual frames are captured by the camera at an angle,
the dialogues are too fast and overlaps constantly while generous
use is made of modern day information chutzpah such as e-mails,
chats, and so on within an office situation. The result is
that technique tends to drown the content and the film ends
in utter confusion.
Angelina Maccarone of Germany’s Unveiled was one of the
most outstanding films in the festival. It is a strikingly
unusual document relating the experiences of a young woman
Farida, who is forced to run away from her home country, Iran,
because of her lesbian relationship with a woman. She reaches
Germany but the authorities turn down her request for asylum.
She assumes the identity of a Russian man she befriends on
the way who commits suicide. She writes letters to the family
of this man pretending to be their son. Desperate to get back
to her female persona, she tries to change over, only to get
back to her male mask all over again. Journeying at break-neck
speed from one issue to another, Unveiled touches issues of
identity, homosexuality, friendships, and, Islamic fundamentalism
without actually articulating these verbally.
Murmuring Coast from Portugal (Margarita Cardoso), a political
film, tries to get under the skin of the complex lives of
women whose husbands have gone to fight a war they do not
believe in and what happens when one of the wives discovers
that the husband she felt was a soldier is actually an underground
political extremist working against the very country he supposedly
represents. A viewer not familiar with the political history
of Portugal will find it difficult to understand the film.
The Welt from Poland, a screening not within the programme
schedule, turned out to be the most disturbing film of how
constant abuse of a child by his father can lead the child
to grow up to be a replica of his cruel father till the father
is dead. Yet, when the father dies, he is filled with a deep
sense of loss.
Though called a Women film Festival, the most positive element
the festival is that none of the films screened was in any
way indicative of the filmmaker's gender identity. Unless
told, no one watching these films will be able to guess whether
the director is a man or a woman. In other words, this suggests
that women directors are unwilling to be ghettoised because
they happen to be women. Creativity on celluloid, as in all
spheres of art and science, this festival proves, is gender
neutral.
|
