We Are The Best – Bitch Flicks

The Athena Film Festival: Pushing the Conversation Forward

“We’ve been very lucky,” Silverstein says. “People have given their time to come in and share and teach, because we want to inspire people. The goal, really, is to just allow girls to dream and to believe that they could be directors and producers and writers, and for boys to see women can do this, too.” Silverstein hopes the message they take away is, “Everybody can be successful. It’s about talent. It shouldn’t be about your gender.”

This is a guest post by Josh Ralske.

The Athena Film Festival has grown more ambitious with each passing year, and this year, its fifth, is no different. The festival’s co-founders, Kathryn Kolbert of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College, and Artistic Director Melissa Silverstein of Indiewire‘s Women and Hollywood, spoke with us about this year’s festival and the scant progress women filmmakers have made in Hollywood in recent years.

This year’s festival has gotten unprecedented media attention for its premiere of Dan Chaykin’s Rosie O’Donnell: A Heartfelt Stand Up and for Lifetime Achievement honoree Jodie Foster. The opening night film, Kim Longinotto’s Dreamcatcher, is a documentary about Brenda Myers-Powell, a former prostitute from Chicago who has turned her life around and devoted herself to helping other women and girls break free of the cycle of abuse and exploitation.

“Once I saw Dreamcatcher and I saw this amazing woman, Brenda, I just knew that it was our movie,” Silverstein tells me. “It’s just one of these stories of people that are doing amazing work in their communities that you would never see. We’re thrilled to be able to share the story at its New York premiere.”

“We’re looking for films that are inspiring and that can demonstrate positive social change in ways that demonstrate women’s agency, their ability to make a difference,” Kolbert explains, “and I think Dreamcatcher really fulfills all of those goals. It’s a particularly inspiring film, and one in which individual women have worked together to make a difference in the lives of women who have lived as prostitutes and wanted to come out of that world.”

Still from Dreamcatcher — Still from *Dreamcatcher*

Dreamcatcher‘s themes fit perfectly with the festival’s unique goals and mission. “We’re a unique festival in that we tell the stories of women in leadership roles,” Kolbert says. “We show films that are made by both men and women, as long as women are the protagonists of the story.”

As the festival’s main programmer, Silverstein works at finding a balance between “movies that have been overlooked,” and “great stuff that might have been playing at their multiplex that they missed.”

Co-Founders of the Athena Film Festival, Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein

“What I try to do is curate a conversation,” she explains. “So I want to be able to have foreign movies, movies about women leaders in all different areas: in music, in science, in sports. It just shows the breadth and the depth of what women’s experiences are, and that’s what I try to do.”

While Silverstein is often frustrated by what studios will send to the small but steadily growing festival, sometimes she sees a film that she knows immediately they need to show. That was the case at the Berlinale last year, where she saw Athena’s Closing Night film, Difret, Ethiopian-born filmmaker Zeresenay Berhane Mehari’s drama of a teenage girl who responds violently when she’s abducted into marriage, and the bold young lawyer who takes her case. “The second I saw that movie, I knew that it had to play Athena,” Silverstein states, “and I have been like a rabid dog trying to get that movie.”

This year’s festival also includes some higher profile films, including the Centerpiece, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s underseen backstage drama, Beyond the Lights, featuring Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Minnie Driver, screening Saturday with the filmmaker, who’s receiving an award from the festival, in attendance. Filmmaker Gillian Robespierre will also be on hand for Satuday’s screening of her bluntly funny Obvious Child. The racially charged indie comedy Dear White People and Lukas Moodysson’s buoyant punk rock coming-of-age film We Are the Best! will also screen this weekend.

Then there’s actor-director-producer Foster’s well-deserved honor, the Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement Award. “Foster has been a quiet leader,” Silverstein says. “She’s been pushing the boundaries. She started to direct, as an actress before other actresses did that.” As an actor, Foster’s career highlights expanded Hollywood’s vision of the type of roles women could play. “The roles that she won the Academy Award for … The Accused was about gang rape, and that was in the late ’80s. That wasn’t a subject matter that was discussed at that time, and she really took that on,” Silverstein points out, “and then with Silence of the Lambs, she was really ahead of the curve. I think that’s what the Athena Film Festival wants to be, and Jodie embodies that.”

As a director, Foster hasn’t made a feature since 2011’s The Beaver, starring her embattled friend Mel Gibson. Like many talented women directors, she’s turned to the small screen, directing episodes of Netflix’s House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. She has a new feature in pre-production, Money Monster, starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts.

I asked both Kolbert and Silverstein if 2015’s successful films directed by women, including Obvious Child, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, and Amma Asante’s Belle, which opened the festival last year, offer cause for optimism. I pointed out that Michelle MacLaren had been hired to direct the upcoming DC Comics adaptation of Wonder Woman for Warner Bros., based on the strength of her television work, including several outstanding episodes of Breaking Bad. Neither was particularly sanguine about what these milestones mean for women in Hollywood as a whole.

“In the film industry, I don’t see a lot of progress,” Kolbert states, “except for the fact that now the paucity of women in film has become an issue that’s discussed.”

“The numbers have been really static for the last decade,” Silverstein points out. “We did a survey at Women and Hollywood from 2009 to 2013, and 5 percent of all the studio films were directed by women and only 10 percent of the indie films were directed by women.” She doesn’t mince words about the backward attitude those numbers reflect. “That’s just abysmal. We’re half the world. And we don’t get the opportunities. It’s not a lack of talent; it’s a lack of opportunities.”

Silverstein agrees with Kolbert that at least people are talking about the issues involved, as in the Academy’s recent snub of DuVernay, which Kolbert bluntly calls “a travesty.” As Silverstein sees it, “The progress has been in this robust, wonderful, inquisitive, and actually angry conversation about the lack of opportunities for women. I will be very happy when the numbers move to where the conversation is.”

The Athena Film Festival is playing a part in moving things along. That’s why it also includes a practical element, with Seed & Spark’s Emily Best giving a workshop on crowdfunding, and industry leaders Prince-Bythewood, Cathy Schulman, and Stephanie Laing providing Master Classes in their respective fields. “We’ve been very lucky,” Silverstein says. “People have given their time to come in and share and teach, because we want to inspire people. The goal, really, is to just allow girls to dream and to believe that they could be directors and producers and writers, and for boys to see women can do this, too.” Silverstein hopes the message they take away is, “Everybody can be successful. It’s about talent. It shouldn’t be about your gender.”

Kolbert makes a similar point. “My goal for the festival is that over the long term, when you think of leadership, you’re going to picture women,” she says, rejecting the traditional image of “a white guy with a little gray hair at his temples.” She sums up the Athena Film Festival’s mission nicely, quoting Marian Wright Edelman: “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

Josh Ralske is a freelance film writer based in New York. He has written for MovieMaker Magazine and All Movie Guide.

‘We Are The Best’ or Why You Should Be a Lukas Moodysson Fan

“This sucks!” So says one of the main characters of writer-director Lukas Moodysson’s latest, ‘We Are The Best’ (which opens in the US on May 30). Diminutive, mohawked, 13-year-old Klara (Mira Grosin) is reacting to the live show in which she sees the worst of what middle school in early 1980s Stockholm has to offer: girls with long blonde hair in pastel leotards dancing stiffly to The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.” Although Klara, like her best friend Bobo (Mira Barkhammar), listens to punk music, has short hair, and wears the mildly bohemian fashions of the time (scarves and oversized jackets those who were teenagers in that era will recognize), boisterous high-spirited Klara is no nihilist. She is the kind of young iconoclast who has been a mainstay in literature since Mark Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn’ (and even before, going back to ‘Lazarillo de Tormes’)–the kind which girls and women in films (and even in literature) are rarely allowed to be.

“This sucks!” So says one of the main characters of writer-director Lukas Moodysson’s latest, We Are The Best (which opens in the US on May 30). Diminutive, mohawked, 13-year-old Klara (Mira Grosin) is reacting to the live show in which she sees the worst of what middle school in early 1980s Stockholm has to offer: girls with long blonde hair in pastel leotards dancing stiffly to The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.” Although Klara, like her best friend Bobo (Mira Barkhammar), listens to punk music, has short hair, and wears the mildly bohemian fashions of the time (scarves and oversized jackets those who were teenagers in that era will recognize), boisterous high-spirited Klara is no nihilist. She is the kind of young iconoclast who has been a mainstay in literature since Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (and even before, going back to Lazarillo de Tormes)–the kind girls and women in films (and even in literature) are rarely allowed to be. Klara and her friend Bobo–with their highly defined likes and dislikes in music–are also one of the only instances in film in which girls (and even women) are allowed to have taste in (and opinions about) something other than boys and clothes–without the filmmaker or screenwriter denigrating them or their opinions.

Like most 13-year-olds, Klara and Bobo spend their time outside of school trying to alleviate boredom: hanging out at the park or the recreation center, where they cringe at the heavy metal cacophony of teenage boys rehearsing. When the director tells them that whoever has signed up for the rehearsal space is allowed to play as loud as they want, Klara and Bobo see the band has neglected to sign up for their current rehearsal time, fill in their own names instead and succeed in kicking the boys out. For the rest of their allotted time they whale on the instruments the center provides (a bass and drums), shout into the microphones, and have a great time. Their “band” is born.

During the school show they see the reserved, tall, blonde Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) play classical guitar and instead of making fun of her, as they have in previous years, notice that she is talented. They need a guitarist for their band, so they invite her to join.

Hedvig, although conventionally beautiful (LeMoyne in oxford shirts, big sweaters, and hardly any makeup convincingly looks both like a shy teenager from the early 80s and a supermodel on her day off) has no friends at school, always eating lunch alone; the other students have deemed her an outsider because she is “Christian.” But when she accepts Bobo and Klara’s offer, the band of two outsiders becomes three, and they all happily share a lunch table from then on, nicely capturing the transition when teenagers see the value not just in the things but in the people they had previously dismissed as “weird.”

The girls throw their considerable energy into the band (and even play a gig at the end), with Hedvig teaching chords and time to the others, and Bobo and Klara composing anti-sports lyrics to a song when the gym teacher in school orders them to run laps. But we can see they’re still adolescents, in the way Klara and Bobo obsess over teenage boys in a punk band from the suburbs, or egg each other on when they decide to cut Hedvig’s hair (after which Hedvig’s mother lectures them in a surprisingly thoughtful way). The band becomes a cause and a solace to the girls, a way to get through the agony of middle school.

Although Klara’s main lament is that her parents and brothers are alternately boring and embarrassing, and she will never play as well as Hedvig, Bobo has a rougher time. She wears glasses and has cut her own hair into a short, unflattering style which, unlike Klara’s, never looks “edgy,” just awkward. The boys she likes never seem to like her back, and Bobo’s mother practices the type of sunny but apathetic parenting also featured in the contemporary-set Palo Alto. At a party in their apartment her mother points out Bobo’s homemade haircut to the guests, one of whom says, “It’s such a good cut on you,” a statement so patently untrue that it hurts Bobo more than an insult would. After a different night of humiliation, Bobo asks Klara to tell her one good thing and Klara answers, “You’re in the best band in the world,” another lie, but one that is infinitely more comforting to Bobo.

Moodysson also wrote and directed one of my favorite queer girl coming-of-age films Show Me Love (its original Swedish title translates as Fucking Amal) and the ensemble comedy about a commune in the 70s, Together. Klara’s parents and Bobo’s mom could be the characters from Together ten years later: they’ve outgrown the commune, but they still have the same struggles–Klara’s parents arguing about divvying up the housework and Bobo’s mother paying too much attention to her own problems and not enough to her child. The scenes in which Bobo and Klara get drunk from the dregs of cups from Klara’s brother’s party echoes scenes both in Together where the kids drink the wine the adults have left in their glasses, and in Show Me Love when Elin tries one pill from every bottle in her mother’s medicine cabinet to see if they make her “feel anything.”

We Are The Best isn’t quite as sharp or funny as those two previous films. It could use some queer characters: these short-haired, outcast girls in a band together all seeming to be completely straight doesn’t ring true (though Hedvig, even though she’s a year older, doesn’t seem as interested in boys as Klara and Bobo–hmmm). And because the girls are so close, I expected at least one of their harassing classmates to yell “dyke” at one or all of them, which never happens, even though, at that time, queer panic (even in liberal Sweden) was in full swing among adults and would undoubtedly be worse among adolescents. Also anyone who’s not Swedish (or hasn’t spent a lot of time in Sweden) who is expecting to hear familiar music from the 80s (except that Human League song) will be disappointed. Still, the film is delightful and, like Moodysson’s other films, has special insight into the lives of adolescent girls (it’s based on an autobiographical graphic novel by the director’s wife, Coco Moodysson, and features their own daughter in a small role). His touch with the young performers is expert: we never doubt the reality of these girls, their personalities (Grosin’s jaunty, smiling bravado is especially wonderful) or their friendship, all the more extraordinary considering that the actresses are the ages of the characters they play (Grosin was actually younger–11–during filming). Because of their commitment to the band, Klara and Bobo stop fighting about a boy (which could have ended their friendship) and, in the end, all three even earn the respect of the heavy metal band. The girls’ band might not be the best in the world, but it turns out to be the best thing in their world.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R33H0ONZcSY”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.