Women & Gender in Foreign Films

Foreign Film Week: BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival

The 27th BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival: 14 – 24 March 2013

From the press release:

The 27th BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (LLGFF) is back at BFI Southbank London with a festival of 11 days and a new look programme that’s packed full of films, special guests, events, workshops, and music.

[…]

There are over 100 titles in the festival offering a dizzying variety of films reflecting the LGBT community around the world.

Here are a sampling of films playing.

Facing Mirrors

Aynehaye Rooberoo

Director: Negar Azarbayjani

Producer: Fereshteh Taerpoor

Screenwriter: Negar Azarbayjani, Fereshteh Taerpoor

With Shayesteh Irani, Ghazal Shakeri

Iran-Germany 2011

102 min

Sales: The Film Collaborative

Rana, a conservative woman with traditional values, is secretly working as a taxi driver (driving is taboo for women of her class) in Tehran to support her family while her husband is in a debtors’ prison. Rebel with a cause, wealthy Edi/Adineh, is desperately trying to get a passport in order to return to Germany to have gender reassignment surgery whilst avoiding an angry father wanting to marry his daughter off as soon as possible. The State may sanction gender reassignment in Iran but that’s not to say it’s accepted in general society. As Edi’s father says, ‘I wish she was blind, dead, handicapped but not disgraced.’ Fate brings Rana and Edi together and an unlikely friendship develops, transcending social class and ethical differences. Facing Mirrors is a bold, exciting, seat-of-the-pants ride through contemporary Iran.

Mosquita y Mari (2012)

Mosquita y Mari

Director-Screenwriter: Aurora Guerrero

Producer: Chad Burris

With Fenessa Pineda, Venecia Troncoso, Laura Patalano

USA 2012

85 min

Sales: The Film Collaborative

Mosquita y Mari is a gorgeously realised and tender coming-of-age story set in the Chicana neighbourhood of Huntington Park, Los Angeles. Fifteen-year-old Yolanda is a sweet-natured only child who gains straight As and stays out of trouble until she has her head turned by Mari – a tough, cool girl who moves in across the road. Mari is the eldest daughter in a single parent, undocumented family struggling to make ends meet. She is at first uninterested in being friends with her neighbour, but an incident at school pushes the pair increasingly together – sharing homework, music and secret spaces and an intense connection develops between the two girls. Guerrero’s debut feature is assured and subtle, confidently creating a teenage world of awkward affection, lingering gazes and new desires.

Je, tu, il, elle

Director-Producer: Chantal Akerman

Screenwriter: Chantal Akerman, Eric De Kuyper, Paul Paquay

With Chantal Akerman, Niels Arestrup, Claire Wauthion

France-Belgium 1976

85 min

Akerman’s first feature includes one of the earliest depictions of lesbian sex in cinema but it has rarely been seen at queer film festivals. We are excited to be screening this still startling and now deeply influential work as part of our strand considering Akerman’s impact on queer cinema. The film focuses on a woman who remains in her empty room for over a month narrating her minimal actions via a disjointed voiceover. Eventually she travels with a trucker who tells her about his life and arrives at the home of a woman who tries to send her away but then feeds her before they make love.

Lesbiana: A Parallel Revolution (2012)

Lesbiana: A Parallel Revolution

Lesbiana: Une révolution parallèle

Director-Screenwriter: Myriam Fougère

Producers: Pauline Voisard and Myriam Fougère

With Alix Dobkin, Crow Cohen, Imani Rashid

Canada 2012

63 min

Sales: Groupe Intervention Video

Immensely enjoyable documentary following key players in the North American East Coast feminist movement from the 1970s to mid 1990s. Fougère meets lesbian writers, philosophers, activists and musicians who took part in and helped create the second wave feminist community and culture that focussed on women-only spaces in places like Montreal, New York and of course the Michigan Women’s Festival. Comprised of archival footage, photographs and inspiring interviews with the women involved – many in their seventies and eighties now, but still sporting some pretty great dungarees and labryses – the film considers the legacy of this type of sisterhood and lesbian identity in a celebratory but thoughtful, and sometimes critical way. This is an important piece of herstory for all feminists.

She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column

Director: Kevin Hegge

Producer: Kelly Jenkins

Screenwriters: Kevin Hegge, Oliver Husain

With G.B. Jones, Bruce LaBruce, Kathleen Hanna, Caroline Azar

Canada-Germany-USA 2012

64 min

Sales: VTape

Hegge’s documentary about the groundbreaking queer feminist all-female art band Fifth Column – who were at the centre of Toronto’s influential Queercore scene in the 1980-90s – explores the band’s impressive legacy and considers why you might not have heard of them. Featuring interviews with Bruce LaBruce, Vaginal Davis and Kathleen Hanna mixed with rare archival photos, footage of the band performing live and of course new interviews with the key members, Hegge builds an exciting picture of visionary punks living outside of the system in crumbling buildings – making art, music, film and starting fanzine wars.

Foreign Film Week: Red, Blue, and Giallo: Dario Argento’s "Suspiria"

Written by Max Thornton.

I started getting into film when I was a teenager. Growing up with daily power cuts, both scheduled and unscheduled, is not conducive to childhood as a cinephile, and anyway my parents did not consider film a “real” art like literature or music – I can vividly remember being forced, at age seven, to quit Video Club and join Chess Club instead, because my mother did not think that sitting around watching videos constituted a worthwhile extracurricular.

(I am still breathtakingly terrible at chess.)

So, partly as the cultivation of an indoor hobby in response to the unpleasant British climate, and partly as the world’s meagerest teenage rebellion, I started watching films. In particular, I sought out horror films, thanks to the friendly proprietor of our local video rental store (now sadly gone the way of all such places in the Netflix age), who would happily rent the bloodiest, goriest, most revolting 18-ratedmovies to an obviously-14-year-old me, always with a cheery, “Enjoy!”

Most of these.

I was neither a discerning nor an educated viewer, but even so I quickly cottoned on to the fact that certain Italian directors had produced some above-average horror flicks in the 1970s, characterized by a cavalier attitude toward nudity, pervasive Catholic imagery, and lashings of gore. Ignorant of the term giallo, I proceeded to dub this subgenre “spag-horror,” which isn’t actually an awful name for it.

As my initiation into the worlds of sex and violence, many European horror films of the 1970s no doubt occupy a Freudian subspace of my psyche. Probably the Ur-example of this genre and its strange, ambivalent attitude toward women and sexuality is Dario Argento’s 1977 meisterwerk, Suspiria.

From its kickass score by prog-rockers Goblin to its borderline incomprehensible plot, I love damn near everything about Suspiria. For starters, it’s set in a ballet school, which is a direct line to my heart; and it features Udo Kier (UDO! KIER!); plus, it’s a strikingly female-dominated story. Argento says of the film: “there are only three men in it: one is blind, one can’t speak and the other is gay. It’s the women who have the power.” Which is such a problematic statement on so many levels, but let’s just focus on the undeniable fact that the film is mostly about women.

The film opens with American dancer Suzy Banyon (played by a young Jessica Harper – did you know she writes children’s books and has a cookery blog now??) arriving at a German airport on a rainy night. Pretty much the first thing we see is her repeated attempts to hail a taxi; her young face, rain- and wind-swept above the virginal whites of her clothes, expresses a vulnerability that will recur throughout the movie. Her big, frightened eyes peer out of the taxi at the gushing storm-drains, the phallic tree-trunks in the spooky woods, the bright red facade of the ballet school (on the subtly named Escher Strasse). Untoward goings-on, shockingly enough, are underfoot at the school, and Suzy soon finds herself completely out of her depth as things get steadily creepier.

Suzy and Sara, swimming.

What’s particularly interesting about Suspiria, especially in relation to the giallo genre as a whole, is its lack of nudity or overt sexuality. There’s a pretty good reason for this, as Argento explains:

To begin with, I imagined the story set in a children’s school, not of teens. I thought that it could be interesting that the school was for very young girls, eight, ten years old. This was the first version. The distributor strongly opposed this choice, and the film was made also with American money, from Fox, and they were against that too. So I changed the script and raised the girl’s age, but I kept a sort of childish attitude, so the characters behaved like children. The decor too… I used little tricks, for example the doors have the handles not at a normal height, but at face level, the height at which a child of 8 years old would find the handle. It gives the impression of dealing with children, even though they have adult bodies.

I don’t think it’s reading too much into the film to find some Freudian undertones in the whites and reds, in the repeated motif of water, in the pivotal role of irises. There is a strong fairy-tale quality to the film’s artifices, its primary colors, scenes awash in blue or red; the story of the young girl entering a world of danger and threat carries echoes of Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White – Bruno Bettelheim would surely have something to say about that.

Make no mistake, this is a pretty violent movie. There are some quite fantastically grotesque murders. Within the first fifteen minutes, we see a still-beating heart stabbed and a woman’s face split in two by plate glass. Throughout, the lily-white garments of the murdered women are streaked and splattered with bright red blood. We also get a revolting maggot infestation, some magnificently scary chase scenes, and a truly bonkers climactic sequence.

Red, the color of a very murdered woman.

And yet Suzy retains a sense of childlike innocence and vulnerability throughout, relating to her friends and teachers like the little girl she was originally written to be. It’s a very weird juxtaposition, and I think it crystallizes the strange combination of female empowerment and ingrained misogyny that characterizes classic European horror. What, in the end, are we to make of stories where women are both the brutally murdered corpses and the proactive investigators of the mystery; both the pure childlike heroine and the monstrous villain; both desexed and penetrated by sharp objects; both agents and victims?

It speaks volumes to the general lack of such female-dominated stories in our broader culture that I even find myself asking this question.

———-
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Call for Writers: Women and Gender in Foreign Films

We’re excited to announce our latest theme week at Bitch Flicks: Women and Gender in Foreign Film!

(Even the term “foreign film” reveals a U.S. bias, so what we’re really asking for is film made outside of the U.S.)

Since March is Women’s History Month, and this coming Friday, March 8th, is International Women’s Day, we thought this would be an excellent time to take a close look at cinema in many parts of the world, and how women and gender are depicted in non-Hollywood films.

Here are some suggestions–but feel free to propose your own ideas!

Amour
Amelie
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
A Separation
Pan’s Labyrinth
Maria Full of Grace
Persepolis
The Lives of Others
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Volver
All About My Mother
Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Let the Right One In
Babette’s Feast
I’ve Loved You So Long
Caramel
Under the Bombs
City of God
Life Is Beautiful
I Am Love
Yesterday
Indochine
Eat Drink Man Woman
The Maid
Raise the Red Lantern
Celine and Julie Go Boating
In a Better World
Children of Heaven
Camille Claudel
8 1/2
Ghost in the Shell

War Witch
Spirited Away
Kiki’s Delivery Service
My Neighbor Totoro

Some basic guidelines for guest writers:

–Pieces should be between 700 and 2,000 words.

–Include images (with captions) and links in your piece.
–Send your piece in the text of an email, attaching all images, no later than Friday, March 15th.
–Include a 2-3 sentence bio for placement at the end of your piece.

Email us at btchflcks(at)gmail(dot)com if you’d like to contribute a review. We accept original pieces or cross-posts.

We look forward to reading your submissions!