feminist films – Bitch Flicks

Moonfaze Feminist Film Festival: Her Story Illuminated

Writer/Director/Actress and Moonfaze Film Festival Founder Premstar Santana has taken on the challenge of not waiting for Hollywood to feature feminist cinema. She is creating the platform that elevates feminist viewpoints from marginalized voices that rarely get the opportunity to shine.

On December 5, 2015 Writer/Director/Actress and all-around badass Premstar Santana created a phenomenal short film festival centering powerful feminist narratives. Presented inside of LA Mother, (a non-profit organization and multi-purpose creative space that is dedicated to nurturing women in business and the arts), Premstar carved out a safe space for diverse voices from around the globe to flourish. By creating this platform in conjunction with LA Mother, Premstar has taken on the challenge of not waiting for Hollywood to feature feminist cinema. She is creating the platform that elevates feminist viewpoints from marginalized voices that rarely get the opportunity to shine.

The one day evening event started off with a mixer where patrons could nibble on fresh popped popcorn, enjoy some libations and partake of tasty bites provided by a Korean BBQ food truck. Premstar introduced herself the moment I walked in and thanked me for supporting her event. I was immediately struck by her warmth and her sincere appreciation for every person who turned out. And there were a lot of people there. When it was time for the short film showcase to begin, every seat was filled, with an overflow audience sitting on the staircase and standing in the back. A packed house.

The opening film, Luna — written, directed by, and starring Premstar herself — immediately set the tone for the rest of the festival. Premstar’s film let me know that she was not bullshitting about her clarion call to elevate the game. Luna, is an experimental film that introduces us to a woman performing a sacred ceremony inside a circle of burning candles in a dark room. There is a blood offering, an incantation that opens another dimension, and the woman finds herself surrounded by nature and facing a mirror image of herself who simply says “Hello, I’ve been waiting for you…are you ready?” Our protagonist then responds by asking “For What?” Her question is answered by her second self, “To dance.” The film ends with a gorgeous shot of Premstar standing on a sunlit beach watching ocean waves, the full moon high above her head. The piece resonated with me emotionally, and I had the rare moment of instantly recognizing a fellow sister/creator. After watching her other work in the festival (the sci-fi tinged Dos Lunas) I understood Premstar to be a thoughtful and gifted artist. Her work is deeply personal, poetic, and at times haunting. She creates compelling cinema, so I felt confident that I would enjoy the films presented. I felt like I was at a cinema tapas bar, nibbling on all the various films she was spreading before us at LA Mother.

The films themselves ranged from comedy, horror, experimental, dramatic thrillers, documentaries and even a Bollywood drenched piece that had a shocking ending that delighted the receptive audience. One of the crowd favorites was a 6-minute French comedy film called Papa Dans Maman (Dad in Mum) written and directed by Fabrice Bracq. In the film two young sisters hear their mother and father having sex. They try to decide if they should go inside the bedroom to investigate when they hear an unexpected arrival downstairs. The humor worked because of the expressive faces of the young actresses, and the tension that was created by the one sister peeking through the bedroom keyhole and telling the other what she sees.

Another standout piece was the aforementioned 12-minute U.S. Bollywood-Punk Musical, The Pink Sorrys, written by Ben Stoddard and directed by Anam Syed. A deadly girl gang seeks retribution after one of their own is sexually assaulted. The graphic ending was pretty bloody and followed the rape/revenge trope popular in ’70s exploitation cinema. I enjoyed the unique mash-up to tell an unpleasant story about violence against women’s bodies. And come on — Bollywood. Punk. Musical. You got me.

Afghan rapper Sonita Alizadeh directed and stars in a music video called Brides for Sale where she spits her own rap lyrics advocating for the end of forced marriages globally. In Diyu (written and directed by Christine Yuan), a teenaged girl is caught between heaven and hell in a strangely hypnotic experimental film that won the Best Director Award at the end of the evening.

The festival found the right balance of showing some serious life-altering narratives alongside lighter fare that was equally compelling in different ways. One of my other comedy favorites was a film starring Moonfaze’s Festival Manager Sarah Hawkins. Roller Coaster (written and directed by Sarah’s father Bradley Hawkins) is a sweet tale about Emily, an aspiring actress who sets out for an audition, only to encounter obstacles that may cause her to miss her big break. The film playfully highlights the plastic-looking homogeneity of casting calls where women feel the need to look a certain way (mainly white, thin, surgically enhanced or bleached in some way). What struck me about Sarah Hawkins as an actor is that her face had that classic oldschool natural beauty that I miss. In fact, that is what struck me about most of the films in the festival. All these wonderful new faces that don’t have the bland manufactured Hollywood “look.”

At the close of the festival, awards were given in various categories for Best Screenwriting, Cinematography, Acting, Best Experimental Film, Best Documentary, and Best Director. I left the festival elated and impressed with the quality and variety of the films I watched.

A few days later, still excited about the festival, I contacted Premstar and invited her and Festival manager Sarah Hawkins to talk about Moonfaze on the Screenwriter’s Rant Room Podcast I co-host. It was important to give these feminist filmmakers another platform to talk about their work. You can listen to the podcast here.

Premstar said she conceived the idea for the festival in the summer of 2015, and less than six months later it came to fruition. Feminist filmmakers are hungry and ready to share their stories and 2016 will see another Moonfaze Film Festival. As I told Premstar and Sarah on the podcast, the work that Moonfaze has done is reminiscent of song lyrics done by the acapella singing group, Sweet Honey in the Rock. The lyrics are, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Simply put, we don’t have to wait for someone else to do this work. Fam, we got this. We really do.

Premstar Santana and all the filmmakers involved in the very first Moonfaze Film Festival are bold, unapologetic, and creating new life-giving narratives. I look forward to the 2^nd Annual Festival. You should too.

For more information about the Moonfaze Film Festival and Premstar Santana, check out these websites:

premstarsantana.com

moonfaze.lamother.com

Staff Writer Lisa Bolekaja is a speculative fiction writer, screenwriter, podcaster, Sci-Fi slush reader for Apex Magazine, and a devoted cinefile. A former Film Independent Fellow and a member of the Horror Writers Association, her fiction can be found on Amazon.com.

‘Spy’: Truly Funny and Truly Feminist

An advantage of getting older is being able to predict what types of maintream entertainment I won’t enjoy and then being able to cheerfully avoid them. I have never even seen a clip from Breaking Bad: the fulsome interviews with the (male) cast and creator on NPR were all I needed to hear. In the many years people have been posting “hilarious” Saturday Night Live clips I’ve found only “Brownie Husband” and Tiny Fey as Sarah Palin funny, so now I just skip them. With movies I am a lot more susceptible to hype, especially if the film is about a woman or women. I’ve been let down enough times that, for about the past decade, I’ve seen hardly seen anything at the multiplex, especially “comedies” which rarely make me laugh out loud or even smile. After sitting through The Devil Wears Prada, I decided I would no longer believe anyone who said, “You’ll like this one.”

The melding of feminism and marketing means that certain crappy, mainstream films try to convince us our duty is to shell out money for them just because they’re directed by women, written by women or star women. This marketing, of course, is the best way to kill movies directed by, written by, or starring women once and for all, by force-feeding us films that are supposed to be “good” for women but which give us no pleasure when pleasure, or something like it, is why we go to movies in the first place. What I find especially galling is when a film that is supposed to “empower” women ends up making one the butt of the joke, but instead of being a joke just because she’s a woman (as she would be in the usual bro-comedy) she’s a joke because she’s fat, or not white or because her appearance doesn’t conform to the ultra-femme standard of most women characters in movies. I feared that Spy, which opens this Friday, June 5, and stars Melissa McCarthy (who has been in more than one of the type of films I’ve described) might be another disappointment, but was pleasantly surprised.

The film starts out strong with a pre-credit sequence in which McCarthy’s character, Susan Cooper, from an office in Washington DC, guides spy Bradley Fine (Jude Law) through various ambushes and traps in an Eastern European mansion/castle using an earpiece, a contact lens camera and surveillance technology–plus her own expertise. She’s the super-competent office assistant that most powerful men have back at the office. She never falters and he, in the mold of James Bond and Jason Bourne never does either until the end when he confronts a villain and makes a huge error (which, in context, made me laugh out loud). At first Susan says, “Oh my God, why, why did you do that?” But then, like all great office assistants she immediately takes the blame, saying she should have taken additional measures to prevent the incident, even though we see she has already taken more than enough.

Susan has a crush on Fine (who wouldn’t? Law here is at his most charming and, unlike in some other recent roles, has hair) which keeps her in his thrall. She confesses her desire to be a real spy only to her office mate, Nancy (a wonderful Miranda Hart, whom some might recognize from Call The Midwife), who tells her, “You play it too safe.”

Also on hand is Allison Janney (in one of the brusque, take-charge roles she does so well) as the agency boss who has no patience with Susan until she realizes “We need someone invisible,” in the field. Janney’s character also counsels Susan, saying that Fine, by telling her she was best at her job as his helper was actually holding her back. Susan is eager to take on the sophisticated false identity that she’s seen Fine and the other agents given but always ends up as a variation of a frumpy, Midwestern cat-lady, a sly dig at the type of roles actresses who aren’t slender, like McCarthy, are typically asked to play.

When Nancy and Susan visit the gadget sector of the agency, instead of the cross between a hovercraft and a Segway we see a good-looking man in a suit and tie thoroughly enjoying himself on, Susan receives a bottle of “stool softeners” that are actually poison antidotes along with equally unglamorous accessories. Once in Europe she runs into another agent (who is supposed to be lying low) Rick (Jason Statham making fun of his usual “tough guy” roles) a bungling braggart who takes every opportunity to disparage Susan’s skills as a spy, even as we see that she brings the same efficiency to her work in the field as she did back in the office.

In a world where “satire” is used as a descriptor for works like Entourage, the word might not have much meaning, but Spy, in the tradition of the best satire, makes fun of conventions we might not have realized we were sick of–like the cat-lady typecasting. Also, while male action heroes like 007 and Jason Bourne never make a wrong move, no matter how extreme the situations they find themselves in and shoot and kill others with all the sensitivity of a giant swatting at flies, two of the women in Spy who kill react more like the rest of us might: neither plays it cool.

spy-rose-byrne-melissa-mccarthy — Rose Byrne as Rayna and Melissa McCarthy as Cooper (front)

I kept on waiting for the film to go wrong, for someone to humiliate Susan for her size, which miraculously never happens. Others doubt her skill and the villainess Rayna (Rose Byrne, having a ball as a spoiled, rich Daddy’s girl with a British accent) rips apart her fashion sense, even after Susan changes into flattering, chic evening wear, but no one ever comes close to making a fat “joke” or comment, which has to be some kind of milestone: imagine if Will Smith or Denzel Washington had spent a good part of their careers being the butt of racist jokes–and how different their careers would then be today.

I haven’t before seen McCarthy in a role I’ve liked, so was gratified to see how good she was in this one, which calls on her to take on multiple identities, sometimes switching personas in the middle of a scene. Writer-director Paul Feig (the director of Bridesmaids who is also one of the only male directors to publicly support the ACLU action on behalf of women directors in the industry) gives us the same settings as the real Bourne and Bond films use: European casinos, lakefront estates and helicopters, but isn’t so dazzled by them that he forgets to include jokes, good ones. For once no one is making fun of the office ladies (Hart’s Nancy also gets her turn in the field) but of those who make fun of the office ladies, like Rick, who by the end grudgingly admits that Susan has done a good job though we see he’s still not the smartest guy. I even liked the celebrity-as-himself cameo (Fifty Cent, who gets a great last line) and some of the physical comedy, which is a first for me.

The film isn’t perfect. I could have done without Peter Serafinowicz’s terrible Italian accent as a lecherous fellow agent and would remind everyone involved that Europe (not to mention Washington DC) has plenty of people of color and encourage them to cast some in speaking roles (the villains here are Eastern European, so we don’t even get Arab actors, though Bobby Cannavale, who is half Cuban, plays one hard-to-kill baddie). The film also includes a scene where Cooper and Nancy tear down a friendly, thin, well-dressed woman agent behind her back and an instance where a newly glammed-up Cooper delights in being the target of street harassment, false tropes that a woman writer-director probably wouldn’t have perpetuated. But Spy is so much better than any other film in its genre (and unceasing in its feminism: the solidarity between the women characters continues right through the end) that even those who put together the trailer must not have been able to believe it, since they strung together–badly–moments that make the movie look like the usual summer mediocrity. It’s not! Instead we finally have an action-adventure comedy that is truly funny and truly feminist–and almost makes me look forward to my next trip to the multiplex.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAqxH0IAPQI” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender