{"id":202553,"date":"2019-02-17T03:25:49","date_gmt":"2019-02-17T08:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=202553"},"modified":"2019-02-17T03:25:49","modified_gmt":"2019-02-17T08:25:49","slug":"women-filmmakers-have-record-showing-at-berlin-film-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2019\/02\/17\/women-filmmakers-have-record-showing-at-berlin-film-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"Women filmmakers have record showing at Berlin Film Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"
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FILE: And here, they’re all together for the European premier of ‘The Souvenir’: Joanna Hogg, Tilda Swinton, Honor Swinton Byrne & Tom Burke \u2013 Stellar! (Photo<\/a>: @berlinale\/Instagram<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

BERLIN \u2014 The voice of the female filmmaker was louder than ever at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, with seven out of the 16 films in the competition section helmed by women, and female directors from all corners of the globe featured prominently.<\/p>\n

Women directors represented 63 per cent of the films presented across the festival’s 15 different sections, making it the biggest representation of women directors in the festival’s 69-year history. In addition, the Berlin Film Festival’s selection committee was overwhelmingly female.<\/p>\n

There were originally 17 films in competition but one film from China was withdrawn.<\/p>\n

This year’s festival, also known as the Berlinale, wraps up on Sunday. It has been rich with global women telling female-focused stories, including Michela Occhipinti’s feature debut \u201cFlesh Out,\u201d about the practice of gavage, the forced fattening-up of young girls before their weddings in Western Africa.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are half, maybe more than half the population,\u201d she said of women. \u201c(We are) feeling something different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other female-centred stories included Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska and her feminist satire \u201cGod Exists, Her Name is Petrunya;\u201d \u201c37 Seconds,\u201d a tender story from Japan about sex and disability from Hikari; and Austrian filmmaker Marie Kreutzer’s \u201cThe Ground Beneath My Feet,\u201d which looks at a high-performing career woman struggling with a sister with mental illness.<\/p>\n

There was also the black-and-white lesbian love drama \u201cElisa and Marcela\u201d from Spanish filmmaker Isobel Coixet.<\/p>\n

British director Joanna Hogg presented her fourth feature film, \u201cThe Souvenir,\u201d which followed a young girl through film school in the 1980s. Part autobiographical, part fiction, \u201cThe Souvenir\u201d stars Honor Swinton Byrne as a student filmmaker alongside her mother, Tilda Swinton, who plays her on-screen mom.<\/p>\n

Hogg says she wants to encourage more women to make films and explains that one of the reasons for making the movie was to show a woman as an artist.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all talk about films about directors like the wonderful ‘8 1\/2’ which I’m very inspired by, but they’re always these male directors, these sort of male egos,\u201d she said. \u201cSo I’m kind of very interested in the female ego.\u201d<\/p>\n

Swinton, who has directed documentaries, says for her, the role models have always been there.<\/p>\n

\u201cI personally as a filmmaker was always aware of the great comradeship of female filmmakers. And you don’t have to look very far to know how many female filmmakers have always been making films. It just, they don’t necessarily get the column inches\u201d in the press, she said.<\/p>\n

That wasn’t the case for Danish director Lone Scherfig, who opened this year’s festival with \u201cThe Kindness of Strangers.\u201d She says she didn’t have much inspiration from women filmmakers or the female characters she watched on screen growing up in Denmark.<\/p>\n

\u201cWomen were always happy and pretty and I, even as a little girl, would go to the cinema in a starched dress with a bow and dress up in order to go to the cinema to watch those women and wanted to be them,\u201d she recalled.<\/p>\n

She says for her it was a big jump to making films \u201cinstead of just sitting, being, wishing you were Audrey Hepburn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sitting pretty is far from the minds of many of today’s women filmmakers, and the characters they create on screen are also challenging gender stereotypes.<\/p>\n

South African director Jenna Bass fought hard to get her contemporary all-female western \u201cFlatland\u201d made the way she wanted it, and even to be able to describe it as a western.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know that it breaks a lot of the rules but really the only thing that’s really fundamentally missing that is usually in a Western is macho guys, and I just don’t think that that’s a prerequisite of the genre,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Bass, like Scherfig, found the portrayals of women she watched on screen growing up to be unrealistic.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy ideas about what a romantic relationship between a man and a woman or between anyone should be like was informed by movies,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd when life didn’t correspond to that … I thought that I’d done something wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

She puts much of this down to the male dominance of the industry.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll my role models were men, and all the films that I loved were about men. And I didn’t really think too much about that for quite a while until I think I just generally started develop my own kind of like political consciousness about the world around me and start to question why that was,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Indian filmmaker Zoya Akhtar was in Berlin for her movie \u201cGully Boy,\u201d which looks at the urban rap music scene in India. She feels today’s women filmmakers are not only writing exciting female characters but \u201clegitimate men.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s really important to see how we see men and how we want to see men and what we think is heroic and what we think is something worth saluting,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd it needn’t always be larger than life and it needn’t be that kind of toxic masculinity, because that’s not what we want.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bollywood superstar Alia Bhatt stars in \u201cGully Boy\u201d as the feisty, charismatic Safeena. She says she is often approached with offers of \u201cstrong female characters\u201d or \u201cfemale-led stories\u201d but jokes that she hopes for a day when that doesn’t need to be highlighted.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust get me a film and just be like you’ve got a good part. That’s it you know?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s \u201cMr Jones,\u201d the story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, also showed at the festival. Holland points out that some \u201cextremely courageous and extremely creative filmmakers\u201d have helped shape her career, including 90-year-old Agnes Varda, who was honoured at this year’s festival with the Berlinale Camera award for lifetime achievement.<\/p>\n

The 70-year-old concludes that there have been a \u201clot of wonderful women in history and will be even more in the future I hope. I think that we will take over.\u201d<\/p>\n

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