Final Bidding for “Visions” Show and Best of the Fest Screening

Bidding on work in the WFF “Visions” show will end promptly at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 29th.

The Women’s Film Festival will be holding a closing party for its very successful 2008 fundraiser on Saturday, March 29th from 5:00 to 7:30 at the Hooker-Dunham Theater & Gallery. This year, for the first time, the festival will screen the Best of the Fest at its closing event. This year’s winning film is “Time to Die.”

If you missed “Time to Die” first time around you have another chance to catch this wonderful film about a Polish matriarch, a film one festival-goer lauded as “a beautiful film on every level”. A majority of those who viewed it gave it the highest “Wow” rating.

In a virtual dead-heat with “Time to Die” was “Run Granny Run”, a film about 94 year-old Doris Haddock’s run for a U.S. Senate seat from New Hampshire. A close third was “A Walk to Beautiful.”

“Run Granny Run” is available at First Run Video, a festival sponsor, which now has a WFF section.

The admission price for the screening is $8.00, and is an extension of the fundraising effort for the Women’s Crisis Center. Admission also includes hearty refreshments, a musical interlude by Leah Stuart, and the opportunity to place a final bid on the object of your desire in “Visions”, the silent auction art exhibit that is a conjoined event with the Women’s Film Festival. Fifty or one hundred percent (50% or 100%) of auction proceeds, at the artists’ discretion, goes to the Crisis Center. Refreshments and bidding are free and open to the public.

The Hooker-Dunham Gallery is open from 12-2 every day leading up to Saturday’s closing party.

For more festival results and news, go to: www.womensfilmfestival.blogspot.com

DAY OF SWEETNESS (ALSO LAST DAY)(FOR ME)

by Joyce Marcel

"Caramel" by Nadine Labaki is a Lebanese drama about three stunning women who work at a beauty parlor. It also tells the story of their friend, a seamstress who lives across the street with her demented elderly sister. And a mysterious young woman whose long, long black hair serves as a bridge to her relationship with one of the hairdressers. And family members. And a very lovely and handsome policeman who is in love with one of the hairdressers.
In other words, Labaki has filled her film with fascinating - and very good to look at - characters.
The caramel in the title refers to the way the women depilate - by making a taffy out of heated sugar and water, manipulating it with their fingers until it is pliable, putting it on the leg and then ripping it off.
Ouch.
On the other hand, the film made me - who hasn't worn makeup in over 20 years - to run out and buy turquoise shadow and kohl.
Labaki is a gifted filmmaker with a strong sense of the visual - each scene is filled with detail and beautifully framed. She's also an original - there is one breathtaking scene where the most headstrong hairdresser stands in the window and talks to her married lover on the phone, while across the street, her policeman watches from a cafe and carries on his own side of the conversation.
Another of the hairdressers is getting married. Her problem: she is not a virgin. But in Lebanon, they have surgery to re-sew the hymen and fool the husband on the wedding night.
And before we raise our eyebrows and thank God that we live in a country where virginity is not the be all and end all of a woman's life, let's remember that we now have plastic surgery to make your vagina look like the vagina of a 16-year-old. And women line up for it.
We haven't come any distance at all, baby.

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Saturday turned out to be the last day of the festival for me. Sunday was Easter and I had family to hang out with. So I missed the estimable Carolyn Partridge's comments after "Iron Ladies of Liberia," but I'm fairly certain that she encouraged more women to get into politics.
Now the festival committees are meeting to pick "Best of Fest," tally up the numbers and the contributions, and read the cards. I'll post them here when they're done.
In the meantime, here's my summary (I saw 20 out of the 30 films):
Best Picture: "Time to Die" (with "Caramel" and "Live-In Maid" right behind it.)
Most Boring Picture: "Women Behind the Camera," followed by "Let's Face It: Women Explore Their Aging Faces."
Best Documentary: "A Walk to Beautiful." Just because.
Most Inspiring: "Iron Ladies of Liberia." I love Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
Most Enchanting: Kris Carr and her "Crazy Sexy Cancer."
Most Missing: Sex! Sex! Sex! Come on, throw us a break.
Best Thing About the Festival - After the Movies: Meeting new people and having unexpected conversations with people you already know.


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I want to thank the Women's Film Festival for giving me the opportunity to see the films and blog about them. It's been an amazing week. And special thanks to the Brattleboro Reformer for hosting the blog, and to Jacqueline Gens for serving as Web Master for womensfilmfestival.blogspot.com.
So one last post at the end of the week, and then I'll be done. Thanks for reading.

BORED DAY

by Joyce Marcel

First, I need to say that watching films at the New England Youth Theater was quite a different experience. First of all, it was freezing in there. Secondly, while the Hooker Dunham seats, hard as they are, envelope you once the lights go down, the NEYT seats leave you open and exposed.
Subtitles, however, which disappear at the Hooker-Dunham, are easy to read at the NEYT because of the high rake of the audience.
And the coffee is good. And they had vegetable plates as well as cookies.
But had to happen, right? The worst film at the festival? OK, maybe that's a little strong, but definitely the most boring film - at least among the ones I've seen - was "Women Behind the Camera."
It stands to reason, in a way. The film, by Alexis Krasilovsky, is a portrait of and homage to ground-breaking female camera operators in feature films, news reports and documentaries.
These aren't the directors of the films. They're the women behind the cameras who make the images.
This was an international film, and female camera operators from many countries all say the same thing: first it was a man's world, it was hard to break in, in the beginning the cameras were heavy, a female ground-breaker mentored her, she finally broke through and made films.
The women are from China (the footage, fascinating, is of early Mao in the countryside), India (Bollywood), France, the U.S., Canada, Australia, Russia and Mexico. But the story is the same.
Among the interesting bits:
- An American photography director talks about getting groped by Arnold Schwarzenegger while shooting "Pumping Iron."
- A woman in Afghanistan film a man with a rifle dragging a woman in a burka to a cliff and then shooting her in the head. No commentary, no explanation. Just the footage. Most startling image in the movie, and the movie passes it right by.
- A photographer named Estelle Kirsh says, "People do not see because they're blind between the ears." I like that quote.
The solution the women found? Organization. And forcing the unions to accept them.
But these were women with intense aesthetic abilities. Just watching them talk - for 90 minutes! - was dull. And insider-y. Too dull and insider-y for me.


The film that followed was "Let's Face It: Women Explore their Aging Faces" by Wendy Oser, Joan Levinson and Beverly Spencer. This is an example of a good film idea gone very quickly bad. The women, six of them, I believe, are old friends who meet frequently for interpretive dancing, dinners and conversation. Over a period of two years, they also meet to be filmed talking about their looks.
Yes, the culture worships youth. Yes, it's shocking when age lines first appear. Yes, we all think about plastic surgery at times. Yes, we're all insecure about our looks. Yes, they say that men have character in their faces as they get old, but women just have wrinkles. Nothing new there.
The close-ups show the women's wrinkles, wattles, age spots, lines, bags, chin hairs - it's hard to hide anything from the camera, which is very cold.
And they talk and talk and talk - I know, that's the point. But they rarely say anything interesting.
Among the gooid bits, one woman said that as she watched her face age, she realized how much of her inner self it showed. I found that to be insightful.
Another woman, the vainest of the lot - she had had eyeliner and lip liner tattooed on her face! - talked about her face lift and how glad she was to have gotten it. "It's a paradox that you have to cut a piece of yourself to like yourself," she said.
Luckily the film was short - only 26 minutes - but it seemed to go on for hours.
As a woman - and an aging woman, at that, I quickly started getting mad. Don't these women have anything else to think about, I started wondering. Don't they have to work? How much time can you spend thinking about your looks?
When, at the end, they showed the women's ages, they turned out to be all younger than me. Self-indulgent doesn't begin to describe this, and don't get me started about the interpretive dancing.
The honest truth about these women? When they smiled, and sooner or later they all did, they were all very, very beautiful.
They should have figured it out a long time ago - when you're fully present, you're always beautiful, no matter how you look.
Oh right - that's another thing the culture teaches us, if we're willing to listen and learn: beauty's only skin deep, and it's always in the eye of the beholder.

WEDNESDAY: ANOTHER BEST DAMN FILM DAY

by Joyce Marcel

I knew I was going to say, "Best film of the festival" more than once. I've already said it for "Time to Die," and now I'd like to add the Argentine movie "A Live-In Maid," written and directed by Jorge Gaggero, to the mix.
I guess I like dramas.
You know how sometimes a film just leaves you warm inside, like you're smiling for no reason that relates to anything in your own life? And you wake up the next morning and you're still smiling? That's this film.
I'm not the only one in love with it. The Web site Rotten Tomatoes gave it 100 percent.
Actress Norma Aleandro plays Beba Pujol, a wealthy woman of a certain age, a drama queen, a manipulator, an elegant and stylish and careless woman, quite lovely and totally helpless, living in Buenos Aires in the time of Argentina's economic collapse.
She has a daughter living in Madrid who appears to be estranged, and either a brother or an ex-husband - I couldn't quite get the relationship - whom she sees and who helps her out occasionally.
And she has a live-in maid, Dora, played by Norma Argentina in her first film. Dora is stout, phlegmatic, stoic, hardworking and loyal. She's worked for Beba for 28 years.
Beba and Dora have a strictly mistress-maid relationship, but things change when Beba slowly starts becoming poor. She can't pay Dora, and by the time she's behind by seven months salary, Dora has to leave.
To salvage her pride, Beba cashes in all her gold and diamond jewelry to pay Dora before she goes. Then she tries to disappear into a bottle of whisky, while Dora, living in her own home in the country with a cheating live-in boyfriend, tries to forget her.
But the women's bond is too strong either of them to deny.
From IMDb: "Both Beba and Dora are endearingly flawed - the former supercilious and unyielding, the latter torn between contempt and sympathy for her former boss. Argentina is gruffly impressive as the emotionally-contained maid, while Aleandro's monstrous but piteous snob is an equally sharp portrayal. In Gaggero's measured telling, the pair's not-quite-friendship rings all the more true for being revealed with unsentimental compassion."
And from Rotten Tomatoes: "Gaggero not only draws out such nuances from the two women but illustrates the complexities of their friendship with carefully constructed cinematography."
I won't spoil the ending, but if you see the film, you can guess how it's going to come out even before it is halfway over. And it's a lovely, true and just ending.
The movie moves slowly. We read the story through the faces of the actors, not through dialog. We feel what they feel. We love them in our own, individual way.
I loved this movie. It's playing again tomorrow, Saturday, at the Latchis at 4 p.m.
By the way, I took Thursday off to reconnect with my own life. Oddly enough, it's still there, although my husband said, "I wish you would come back, already."
How did I spend my night off? Watching "Law & Order" reruns on TV, as usual.
But today is Friday, and if this past week has been a movie sprint, the next three days are the marathon.
Stay tuned. Or come out and see some of the films. Enjoy this rich experience. It won't last too much longer. The festival is over on Sunday.

DAY SIX: DAYS OF OUR LIVES

by Joyce Marcel

Yes, today's Day Six of the Film Festival, and I'm just now writing about days four and five. I apologize. But like most of you, I have to make a living. And since I write for a living, it appeared for a time that my head was going to explode.
But I took a couple of naps, it didn't explode, and I'm back.
On Monday we got to see "Crazy Sexy Cancer," an autobiographical film by the lovely Kris Carr.
Young, and silly and beautiful and open and honest and smart, Carr is the kind of woman of whom they used to say, "her nerves run close to her skin."
When she was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, she started making a film about it. "Crazy Sexy Cancer" is, as she puts it, her journey from "looking for a cure to finding my life."
Carr is terrified and lighthearted at the same time. "It's Stage Four slow-moving cancer," she says. "But there is no Stage Five."
Carr was just starting to make her was as an actress - she did a Budweiser beer commercial that was shown at the Superbowl, for instance - when she received her diagnosis.
We watch her go from one off-the-wall "healing" experience to the next, from a macrobiotic diet to a raw food diet, from yoga to Buddhism, from an alternative healing convention to an upscale New Age resort. She calls herself, fittingly, a "healing junkie."
Along the way she meets - and we meet through her - some other remarkable and accomplished young hip women who are fighting their own battles with cancer, among them a red-haired magazine editor and her once-red-haired-but-mostly-bald-now sister. and a tough punk rock chick. (I have to say that wigs are a huge part of the cancer struggle.)
We see Carr and her friends cry. We see them supporting each other. We see them wrestling with their disease in original ways.
Today Carr is not cancer-free, but her tumors are slow-growing to the point where they are a sideline to her full, rich, funny life. In one of the last scenes in the film, she even gets married to her cameraman. She's totally adorable - the kind of heroine that a really good chick flick would be proud to call its own. And she has a completely fresh take on cancer that explodes the usual "fighting with dignity" stuff.
"I won't call it a gift," she says - and God bless her for it. "Because I wouldn't give it to you."
The title? Because "Life is crazy and sexy, just like cancer." Actually, life is crazy and sexy, just like Kris Carr.


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The next day, I settled in to watch two pictures - after all, a girl's got to eat, so I missed "Outsider - The Life and Art of Judith Scott,' by Betsy Bayha. I'll catch it next week.
But I did see "Still Kicking" by Amy Gorman, a group portrait of six women of artistic talent, well into their 90s, who are still making art.
From the "Still Kicking" Website (www.goldenbearcasting.com):
"Amy Gorman invited Frances Kandl to journey with her throughout the San Francisco Bay Area searching for female role models--very old women, still active artists, living with zest. While Amy chronicles their oral histories, Frances is inspired to compose songs for several of these women, many well past 90, culminating in concerts celebrating lives liberated by age.
"Do these elders energize themselves through their art, craft and musicianship? Whatever their degree of talent, they all embrace a daily routine in which their special art form is an essential part. Each woman is spirited and resilient--interpreting for herself a life worth living to the end. Through their encounters, Amy and Frances unveil the possibility of aging richly, not in spite of becoming very old, but because of it.
"Still kicking honors the gift of age, and poignantly illustrates that growing old can be a time of creative expression and satisfaction. Challenging the perceptions and attitudes towards being old, still kicking is certain to trigger dialogue and ignite the imagination of us all."
I'm not doubting that the women portrayed in this film are remarkable. Whether they're doing flower arrangements ("Flowers are the medium between the seen and the unseen world"), oil paintings, braided rugs, dolls or sculpture, they're all talented, lively and involved. I especially loved Lily Hearst, who played classical piano beautifully, and dancer and teacher Ann Davlin, who said, "Religion is perhaps the greediest art of all arts. The others don't spread war so much."
But.
After the show, Gorman spoke movingly about the gifts of age. "You are your essence," she said.
I took exception to all this worshiping of the extreme elderly. As many of my readers know, I write often about my own mother, who at 90 is still choreographing and dancing. She and her theatrical cohorts down in Florida, however, are dealing with things that I don't think I would have the strength to deal with: loneliness is the big one. But there's also the loss of faculties; the loss of loved ones; the loss of friends - a huge issue; the fear of becoming ill and/or helpless; the restrictions of life, especially after you have to stop driving; incontinence - the list goes on and on.
I often quote the comic Martha Raye about this issue. "Old age is not for sissies."
So I asked Gorman about this after the show. She agreed that she knows more than her share of very old women who are not "living with zest," or who are living with zest, but also fear and great sadness.
"But I was searching for women who would show the possibilities," she said.

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In "Olive Pierce: Maine Master" by Richard Kane, the photographer talks her work.
After a cold and lonely childhood, in which she never fit in with friends who enjoyed shopping, society, going to formal dances and marrying young, Pierce said she has always identified with the outsider.
But still, at the heart of her work is a search for community and communities.
In her search, she's taken many series of photos - of a fishing family, of her own three children (she never mentions a husband), and especially, of children in Iraq.
She said that she became concerned during the run-up to the first Gulf war - the one started by the first George Bush - and went to Iraq to take photos of the children. Their haunted, frightened and hopeful faces tell you everything you need to know about their terrible futures, as guaranteed by the second George Bush. It makes you wonder who the terrorist really is. (See Leila Khaled below.)
When Pierce's pictures are exhibited, she is told that someone says, contemptuously, "You can't even tell what side she's on."
Well, isn't that the point?
The other point?
"You don't crush people by photography," Pierce said. "You hold the spirit up."

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That's it for today. More to come. If you read my column in the Reformer tomorrow, you will see more thoughts about the festival. We'll probably post it here tomorrow. And yes, I plagiarize myself.
Now the big question. Is anyone reading this? Please let us know.

DAY THREE: FISTULAS AND FISTS

by Joyce Marcel

Before the films, some housekeeping.
From all accounts, one of the highlights of the festival so far has been "Run Granny Run" by Marlo Poros. It's a portrait of Doris Haddock, our New Hampshire neighbor Granny D. It ran on Sunday at the Latchis, with lively Granny D, now 98 - did I get that right? - sitting up front and center and answering questions. Sorry I missed it. I feel as if I've failed you as a blogger.
For those of us who seem to be living at the Hooker-Dunham this week, one constant has been Alex Gutterman. He's the latest in what feels like a long line of people trying to make something happen at the theater. He's working along with our own precious resource, Barry Stockwell, and he's trying to add events and music that will attract a younger, hipper crowd.
Before the delightful "Crazy Sexy Cancer," (more below) he told the audience that the festival has been "a transformative experience" for him. So naturally, I asked him why.
"I've been doing sound and projection for all the films," he said in an email. "I've found the series and its content, and the entire experience overall, to be transformative in at least two senses:
1) Deeply educational on women's issues - opening my eyes more widely to unique challenges and achievements of women throughout the world
2) Inspiring me with tales of integrity, courage and hope that have a significance beyond gender."
Thought you all would like to know.
Before I get back to the films, a warning. The Hooker-Dunham Theater, while a Brattleboro treasure, is death on subtitles. They're too low on the screen, and unless you're in the first few rows, you're going to have a hard time reading them. Alex knows about the problem, but because of technical problems, he can't really solve it. I've been sitting on the stairs, and that has made all the difference.

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Amy Bucher, the director, with Mary Olive Smith, of "A Walk to Beautiful," was at the Hooker Dunham for the first showing of the film. The house was packed, and she thanked us for "leaving your beautiful houses on a Sunday night to see a film about childbirth injuries."
At first, she admitted to us, she didn't like the title. "The women are already beautiful," she said. "I didn't understand." But she came around to it in time.
For the rest of us, it's not going to be as easy.
Set in the glorious back country of Ethiopia, as well as in a hospital in the capital, Addis Ababa, the film talks about a forbidden topic that is related to one that here, in our country, we would call child rape. In Ethiopia, it's just part of the culture.
According to the dictionary, a fistula is "an abnormal passage leading from an abscess or hollow organ." In simpler terms, it's a rip or tear or hole in an internal organ - in this case, usually the bladder or colon. It leads to fecal and/or urine incontinence.
In Ethiopia, Niger and other parts of the developing world, these fistulas are epidemic - Bucher called them "the modern leprosy." And they carry the same dreadful stigma.
Ethiopian girls are put to hard physical labor when they are very young - carrying huge filled water jugs for many miles, or working in the fields. So while they are well-fed, their growth is stunted.
They are also put out to marriage at a very early age - sometimes as young as four, but certainly by their teens. When they get pregnant, far away from such things we take from granted, like ob/gyns and hospitals, it is often the case that their public bones have not grown sufficiently to pass a child. In three, four or 10 days of excruciating labor, as they push to give birth, they tear their bladder or anus. The baby is often stillborn, and what they call a "doctor" removes it, piece by piece. Then, still mourning, they discover that they have a permanent "leak."
Those of us in Western societies who are incontinent put on panty liners or diapers and get on with our lives.
But these women are treated differently. They leak. They smell. And they are shunned by their friends, their families and their husbands. Usually, the family builds a shack in the back of the property for them, a simple shelter to keep them from being eating by hyenas, and there they stay, cut off from all human society, often for the rest of their lives. Some kill themselves. All suffer deep loneliness and have psychological damage.
What causes the leak is a fistula, a hole in the bladder or some other part of the elimination system. It's a hole that a surgeon can easily sew closed, but these women, living two- and three-day walks from a main road and days away from the capital, don't know that. They think they are unique, alone, damaged and flawed. And so they suffer in isolation.
Dr. Catherine Hamlin and her late husband, Dr. Reginald Hamlin, founded the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in 1974 to serve this hidden population.
"The Hospital has restored the lives and hopes of more than 32,000 women who would have otherwise perished or suffered lifelong complications brought on by childbirth injuries, specifically obstetric fistula," says their foundation Website, (fistulafoundation.org). "Today, the hospital provides free fistula repair surgery to approximately 1,200 women every year and cares for 35 long-term patients. Located in Ethiopia, it is considered the preeminent hospital dedicated exclusively to victims of obstetric fistula. They have developed the model program for fistula treatment worldwide, and have inspired numerous centers throughout the developing world. It is the world center for fistula treatment, long-term care, prevention, and training."
The hospital now has four satellites in the Ethiopian countryside.
The film is lovely to look at, but more importantly, as it follows a few women from their painful isolation in the countryside to their long journey to the hospital to their surgery to their recovery to their intense happiness, it somehow makes you feel more lovely inside - you take their walk to beautiful with them.
It is wonderful that this work is being done, that people like Hamlin and Bucher exist in the world (Bucher is now taking on the subject of child marriage), that this problem is now being named throughout the developing world, and is known and is being cured.
As one of the surgeons - a male - says of the work, "To do it is a good, good job."
But - and here's the but - there are over 100,000 women still living with this problem, waiting to be helped.

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The fist - raised, defiant, holding a rifle - belongs to the famous or infamous Leila Khaled.
"Leila Khaled: Hijacker," by Lina Makboul, is another of those films (see "Enemies of Happiness") where the subject is far more fascinating than either the filmmaker or the film.
In the early days of the Palestinian uprising, Khaled, born in Haifa in 1944 and stunningly beautiful as a young adult, successfully used hand grenades in to hijack TWA Flight 840 in 1969. Her goal was to make the world pay attention to her cause - the liberation of Palestine. And it worked.
The reason she and her team gave for the hijacking of that particular plane was that an "Israeli assassin" was on board. At the last minute, he decided not to travel. His name was Yitzhak Rabin.
Then Khaled disappeared, underwent a series of six plastic surgeries, and hijacked another plane in 1970. This one landed in London, where she was captured. But three other planes were hijacked at the same time and blown up. No one was killed. The British eventually traded her for the hostage passengers.
When the press got hold of her back then, she reports contemptuously, they asked her all the wrong questions. Had she ever been in love? Had she had sex? How long did she spend in front of the mirror every morning?
"They thought I wasn't human," she said. "I'm a fighter! Ask me about my work!"
Now stout and still defiant, she lives in Amman, Jordan with her doctor husband and two sons, where, somewhat stout but still attractive, she cooks, vacuums the living room in her pajamas, and continues the fight for Palestinian liberation. In the Arab world she is a hero. In the Western world, she is a terrorist.
What she wants? To return to the lost place of her childhood, Haifa. There is no question that this is sincere. Makboul visits Khaled's childhood home and brings her a tile. Khaled bursts into tears.
But the pilot of the El Al plane, who is interviewed in the film, says Khaled does nothing but lie. Her family was never forced to leave, he says. This difference is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by the way. If, at some point, it is not discussed, debated and eventually put to rest, there will never be peace in that part of the Middle East.
Makboul is another displaced Palestinian, but she grew up in Western Europe, where she idolized Khaled as a kind of rock star of terrorism. She is very shy in her interviewing. The film is shaky and not very interesting to look at. And the one burning question that Makboul wants to ask Khaled - did she think, when she hijacked those planes, that she would damage the reputation of Palestinians forever - she never has the nerve to ask face-to-face. Instead, after the filming, she calls her up and asks. And we're not allowed to hear Khaled's answer.
It's interesting to note that during two hijackings, Khaled never killed. She never even hurt anyone. She had strict instructions not to use the grenades, she said. And she strongly disapproves of the 9/11 hijackers. "I don't agree with the killing of civilians," she said.
So, freedom fighter or terrorist, what's it going to be? Well, the filmmaker says this: If your side wins, you're a freedom fighter. If you lose, you're a terrorist.
And what do you think of that?

DAY TWO: ART MADE; ART MAKING

By Joyce Marcel



Sorry, I was zonked when I wrote yesterday, so I forgot to explain that when Sister Jane, in "The Sermons of Sister Jane," was talking about sex as being a God-given, life-affirming gift, she was explaining why she didn't believe in the Virgin birth. After all, I think she said, why would God deny this precious gift - sexual intimacy - to the mother of His son?
That said, let's move on.
Yesterday, I also said that one of the problems with things like women's film festivals is that the emphasis is usually on the women and not on the films - or at least the film as art. "Enemies of Happiness," the Afghanistan film, is a good example. Great idea, great person at the center of the story, great relevance - but terrible film making.
So I was delighted - no, enchanted - to encounter the exquisite "Time to Die," written and directed by Dorota Kedriezawska of Poland in black-and-white.
This is a work of fiction, made in 2007, which tells the story of a 92-year-old old woman, Aniela, played by the actress Danuta Szaflarska, who is living in a large and stately old house which, thanks to the end of the Communist regime, she now occupies alone.
The film tells how Aniela, caught by scheming neighbors and her ungrateful son, at first decides to die, and then comes up with a scheme of her own.
The pacing of film is slow, ever so slow. Smoke rises in the air, candles burn, and the camera focuses deeply on Szaflarska's beautiful, aged, lined face and age-spotted, graceful hands. Every frame is lush with detail - a million leaves on the trees, a million wrinkles on her face - until you are absolutely drunk with the generosity all this ravishing beauty and the painterly light that illuminates it.
The most original concept: half of the time, you are identifying not with Aniela, but instead experiencing her through the expressive face of her dog, Philadelphia. According to IMDb, "the dog was so popular to the first audiences, that they demanded (and got) a special "Canine Award" at the 32nd Polish Film Awards (where actress Danuta Szaflarska had also won Best Actress)."
There were only 20 or so people in the Latchis's downstairs theater when I saw the film, but it's being replayed today at 4 p.m.
This is a stunning, moving film that affects you the way a great piece of music does. Absolutely the best fictional film I've seen so far at the festival. (Actually, it's the only fictional film I've seen so far.)
I think I'm going to say, "Best film in festival" more than once.

The next film I saw was a polemic called "The Motherhood Manifesto," which has at its aim public policy changes to allow more family leave time and to, eventually, bring about universal health care. We're a country that touts its "family values," says the film, but we screw the family at every turn.
Yes.
The film is by Laura Pacheco and narrated by Mary Steenburgen.
Since every other developed country on our planet (and many countries less developed) (actually, most countries) has universal health care, or single-payer national health insurance, or some other kind of national health insurance, it's hard to understand why our country doesn't. (Except that insurance is about 16 percent, I believe, of the nation's economy - an economy that isn't doing too well right now, as you may have heard. And so we may not want to screw with it any more than we have to.)
In any case, we need a national health care system, so I have no problem with that part of the film.
Mothers need time to bond with their babies. Yes. Everybody is working too many hours and children are shortchanged. Yes. Poorer people, especially single mothers, are the hardest hit. Yes. Children spend multiple hours a day connected to electronic equipment (text messaging, television, Internet, everything) and may be losing sight of real life. Yes. Kids see 1,000 murders a year on TV. Wow.
It's hard to argue with all that.
To me, the film appears to be part of a larger movement to either create "mothers" (or parents) as a protected class, or to carve out for them a larger slice of a rapidly diminishing economic pie.
The Web site Momrising.org spells it out: The goal is to bring about "family friendly social and workplace policies."
In the panel discussion afterward, a British woman asked why Americans were so afraid of speaking up for their rights in family matters. She mentioned that in England, with socialized medicine, you can leave your job and still be covered. Here, we stick in jobs we hate just for the medical insurance.
And so it comes full circle.
Frankly, most of us are lucky if we even have jobs (see economy, above). In an uber-capitalist society run by fat-cat billionaires for the exclusive benefit of fat-cat billionaires, workers have no rights at all.
Why don't working people vote their pocketbooks? Why don't they unionize, for example?
Well, as long as Republicans can scare people with tales of "the homosexual agenda" or with immigrants as demons who are coming to take their jobs, their homes and rape their children, people can be
duped into voting against their economic interests. Fools and damned fools. As H. L. Mencken once said, ""No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
And if that fails, give them Britney Spears.


"Making Trouble: Three Generations of Funny Jewish Women" by Rachel Talbot, is a great film with a misleading name.
It's the story of six female Jewish American comedians - how's that for a specialized identity? - Molly Picon, Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, Joan Rivers, Gilda Radner and playwright Wendy Wasserstein. It's hosted by successful comics Judy Gold, Jackie Hoffman, Cory Kahaney, and Jessica Kirson, who sit around a table in Katz's Delicatessen ("Send a salami to your boy in the army") and talk about these women's careers and being female, Jewish and funny all at the same time.
But why "Making Trouble?" There have always been female Jewish (Jewish female? Which modifier comes first?) comics - in vaudeville, in radio, on the stage, in television and in film. In fact, there have always been funny Jewish women.
(Also funny women in every culture and country, but that's not the issue here.)
Does the title imply that if a woman is funny, she's a troublemaker? That's just silly.
I took a copy of this film down to Florida and watched it with my 90-year-old mother. We were both enchanted - after all, it's our heritage, too. But when I saw it again in the packed Hooker-Dunham theater, which rang with laughter, it was doubly wonderful.
Watch this film and be entertained. The energy and talent of Molly Picon - actress, musician, comic, acrobat, what can't she do? And she did it for something like seven decades! I remember watching her on television in the Fifties. The sly wisdom and clowning of elegant Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice, whose Jewish accent was put on for the stage. The sexy Red Hot Mama Sophie Tucker, who was a hooker before she was a star. Then the more modern women, like the great Joan Rivers, who would kill another comic for a turn on stage (she claims that younger comics like Sarah Silverman are taking food from her mouth). Ot innocent, devilishly wicked and adorable Gilda Radner. And the wonderful and funny playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who died much too young.
I found this on the Web site of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and it says it better than I can: "These are women whose comedy defied cultural expectations and changed the rules. Get ready to duck when the zingers fly and guffaw at this hilarious, insightful documentary--an exhilarating mix of contemporary performance, interviews and rare archival footage. What is it that makes funny Jewish women so funny...and so Jewish? Is it a nose wrinkled just so, accompanied by a devilishly sexy grin or a jolting and sarcastic punch line? Is it the acerbic humor of generations of immigrant and first-generation women who fought for a place in America with their brains and their wit, and at the same time needed to make a living? Making Trouble celebrates three generations who, for all of the reasons above, successfully went from vaudeville and the Yiddish theater to Broadway, from Ziegfeld's Follies to Saturday Night Live."
Lauren Antler, one of the producers of the film, talked with the audience afterward. In answer to a comment by Ann Stokes, who said that she wanted more footage of the women, and that she was particularly disturbed by all the men talking in the early scenes, Antler said that archival footage is very expensive. I thought that was interesting. I'd like to see a lot more footage of all these funny women, too.
It's playing again next Sunday at 8:30 p.m.

"What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann," by Steven Cantor, is about making art. It's so much about making art that Cantor gets lost and the movie, as well as the world inside it, is dominated by Mann, the photographer who became famous for her 1992 nude pictures of her children.
"It never occurred to me to leave home to make art," she says.
Luminously lovely herself, with wide blue eyes that seem to go on to the horizon, and totally self-obsessed and obsessed by images, Mann shoots her children, her husband, her dogs, her chickens, her horses, her trees and - hold on - decomposing bodies at a forensic sight. The bodies and some other photographs, including bones from the body of one of her pet greyhounds, which she dug up after it had partly decomposed, were part of an exhibit recently at the Corcoran Museum in D.C.
"I love mummified skin," she says. "It's so beautiful. It looks like fabric."
The photographs are beautiful, truly. As beautiful as they are weird. "There might be some people upset by these pictures," she says. And later, "But it reminds us to embrace life."

DAY ONE: "You can cut the flower, but you cannot stop the coming of Spring"

You can cut the flower, but you cannot stop the coming of Spring, Malalai Joya of Afghanistan,


Review by Joyce Marcel


Women were whirling around in my head when I went to sleep last night, iron women and fearless women and funny women and intense women and sardonic, down-to-earth women and definitely holy women. They were the women I met in the three films that opened last night's Women's Film Festival.

It's the 17th year of the festival, which supports the Women's Crisis Center, which is now in its 30th year - and I'll say this again, damn it to hell, that that after all these years we still have men beating up, controlling and abusing women and children, and we still need safe houses for their victims.

Victim is the word that always terrifies me about these festivals. How many abused women are we going to see in these documentaries, how much outrage are we going to be asked to feel, how badly will our emotions be manipulated?

The other question I go in with is will there be a balance between the art of film - physical beauty, arresting images, spectacular shots - and the boring hand-held-camera shoot. Is it all going to be documentaries, or will this be the year the selection committee goes for art as well as outrage?

Stay tuned and we'll find the answers to these questions - as well as the answers to a number of questions we're not even thinking of yet.

The best film opened the show. "Iron Ladies of Liberia" is a riot, a lesson in good government, an introduction to a number of remarkable women, and an object lesson in female leadership done right.

At the center of this film, by Daniel Junge and Saitta Scott Johnson, is Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who won a national election and took over the country of Liberia after the dictator and troublemaker Charles Taylor was arrested and removed for trial in an international court.

At the time, Liberia was just coming out of 14 years of civil war and chaos - "It stole my childhood," said filmmaker Johnson. The country's waters were all polluted. No one had electricity. The infrastructure was trashed. Ninety percent of the people were unemployed. Corruption in high places was rampant. The international debt to the IMF was in the millions of dollars.

And into this mess of man-made messes comes a divorced 70-year-old grandmother to try and clean it up. A divorced 70-year-old grandmother with, among other things, a Master's from Harvard, a lot of government experience, and a little jail time.

She installed a number of women to run the government - the finance minister, the chief of police. (The chief was my favorite character. A big woman with a sense of humor, she inherited a police force without uniforms, telephones or even guns. When the first shipment of small arms came in from Nigeria, she said, "They make me feel like a natural woman.")
The film follows Old Ma, or Oh Ma, or Ma, as she is variously called, during her first year in office. The best scene came when the dispersed army took to the streets to demand back pay. These men, killers all, were agitating in front of the government house when Johnson came down.

She pushed aside her security and met one-on-one with the leader. Then she invited most of the men inside, to talk.
She disarmed them by agreeing that they deserved whatever back pay they were due. She wryly admitted that the government didn't have the money to pay them their pensions. And then she turned the tables on them. "The people you displaced in the villages, the people you killed or left homeless or beat up - the government has to think about caring for them, too. Don't you agree?"

The ex-soldiers, properly cowed, agreed to moderate their demands and eschew violence in the future.
Respecting your opponent, closely listening to him, agreeing to the rightness of some of his demands, then hitting him with the other side - Old Ma illustrated a new way in which a woman can lead through truth and communication. It was a lovely scene.

The next best scenes - and they're not "scenes" in the usual sense, because they really happened - were the ones in which Johnson tries to ameliorate the country's unspeakable foreign debt. Getting nowhere with the Americans. the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, lo and behold, Old Ma invites in the Chinese. After a formal visit from China's president, the U.S. is a little more eager to listen.

Johnson has her makeup artist do her up for the big meeting at the White House with George W. Bush. At first Bush is excited to be with her, but when she tells him she wants him to lift the debt, he stutters and retreats into babble about "helping you fulfill your dreams." The look Ma gives him is priceless.

But a little later, Condi Rice announces that America is forgiving the country's entire debt. Now Liberia can get down to business. In the last scene, as the people are celebrating Johnson's first year in office, we see her dancing in the street.
Great woman. Great movie.

Lerna, who was sitting next to me knitting socks before the films began, turned when the film ended and said, "We need her here to clean everything up."
Amen, sister!

After the film, Windham County Senator Jeanette White spoke. She said that the country that has the most women in power is - wait for it - Rwanda. Part of that is because a lot of the men are dead. But it's also because women got involved out of a felt need to "take care of the children." Not by wiping their bottoms, necessarily, but by preparing a humane future for them.

People in the audience seemed to want to discuss why America is so far behind in having women in power. Some of the possible reasons offered: we're a capitalist society, and women aren't leaders of corporations (see Sister Jane below); women are infantalized; women are turned into sex symbols; we haven't yet felt a need to "take care of the children"; women wait to be asked while men just go for it; you lose your privacy when you're in politics; women aren't good at raising money for themselves...


White said we have to begin creating a culture where women can be seen as doing anything they want. Again in my humble opinion, I thought we started doing that in 1976. But what do I know? White mentioned Gaye Symington as Speaker of the Vermont House, Nancy Polosi in Washington, and good old Hillary Clinton as women starting to make women in power visible.
Then she mentioned something about too much testosterone floating around, which just about sums up the whole point of the film festival, doesn't it?


The evening showing was packed. Two films were on the agenda. The first, "Enemies of Happiness" by Eva Mulvad and Vores Lykkes Fjender, was a Danish film with subtitles about Afghanistan's "most famous woman," the outspoken 27-year-old Malalai Joya. It follows her as she runs for a seat in parliament, troubleshoots for families in her neighborhood, and avoids being killed. Being an outspoken woman demanding rights for all women in Afghanistan might make your shelf life timed in minutes, and I admit I kept expecting the bomb to go off. But in the end, Joya takes her place in the legislature.
After the film, which was definitely one of those dark, hand-held numbers where not even the spectacular beauty of the countryside could make visually interesting what was on the screen, it was announced that Joya has once again been thrown out of the legislature.

Joya is brave beyond belief, and anyone who thinks wearing a burka or selling women into marriage for dowry is a righteous way of living is, in my humble opinion, brain dead. That may not be politically correct or culturally diverse, but let's face it, a lot of cultures leave a lot to be desired, and Afghanistan is about as macho as you can get. More power to Joya, but it's going to be a long haul.

And yet, and yet...

The New York Times this week ran a letter to the editor that quoted two things from Kipling, who knew a thing or two about the region. In a poem, Kipling said, "When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,/And the women come out to cut up what remains,/Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains/An' go to your Gawd like a soldier." OK, not the most pleasant imagery, but notice the part where "the women come out to cut up what remains." Burka schmurka, the women of Afghanistan have always been known as the fiercest of fighters. Joya stands in a long line of poet-soldiers, and it was a pleasure to know her and to wish her well.

The other thing Kipling said about Afghanistan? And remember, he wrote it in the last half of the 19th Century - "Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old."

Listen and learn, George Bush. Listen and learn.

After the first film, a lot of women got up to stretch and take a break. After all, the seats in the Hooker-Dunham Theater are hard, hard, hard. Hard. Did I mention hard?

Someone asked if we needed a break. Then a strong male voice shouted out, "Keep them moving along." And damn if the woman who asked the question didn't tell the projectionist to start the second movie.
"Where the hell are we?" I said. "What's the point of this festival?"

Then I left for a bathroom break, but someone else must have caught the irony of it, because when I came back they had not yet started the next film.

The third movie of the night was just pure fun. "The Sermons of Sister Jane: Believing the Unbelievable" by Allie Light and Irving Saraf, introduced us to Sister Jane Kelly, a nun for 55 years who blew the whistle on a sex and robbery scandal in her parish. Witty, smart and nobody's fool, she then reexamined the Catholic Church and came to some interesting conclusions. The most important was that the church was exactly like a corporation - hierarchical, with men in charge, after only money and power, protecting its own, keeping all secrets and scandals hidden.

About abortion: Jesus wouldn't have wanted women turned into baby machines. And he would have approved of sex, the most intimate way people can be together and support each other. Homosexuality is just a fact of life, not a chosen lifestyle, so get on with it. Even some popes have been gay. And priests don't have to be celibate - celibacy was just a Middle Ages dodge to keep married priests from leaving their property to their families instead of the church. She even found one pope who ordered all the wives of priests to be captured and sold into slavery. Nice guy.

Sister Jane believes that women should be ordained, and -she was only half-kidding here - that she should be pope. She's got a point.

In 2003, Sister Jane wrote a book: "Taught to Believe the Unbelievable: A New Vision of Hope for the Catholic Church and Society." It's out now in paperback.

She works now with Plowshares, serving the poor.


And that was the first night. Stay tuned for more. And for God's sake, comment and discuss.

Out of Struggle, Art by Joyce Marcel

Out of Struggle, Art
By JOYCE MARCEL

Thursday, March 6
DUMMERSTON, Vermont

Here we are again at the crossroads of art and social change, having the opportunity to watch good and great films about the lives of women in support of the Women's Crisis Center.

Every time the Women's Film Festival comes around, I ask why we need a separate category for "women's" films?

Isn't this a magical era? We have a woman as a viable candidate for president of the United States. We've come a long way, baby, so isn't it fish on a bicycle time now? Can't we just agree that all films are stories and all stories are "human" (Except when they're about animals -- like that rat chef in "Ratatouille" -- and even then, humans define the narrative.)

I'm not talking here about the difference between romantic "chick flicks" and "men's" films about blondes with big bazookas and blowing things up.

When I was young and fervently feminist, I was dumb enough to think that once domestic and sexual abuse was recognized for what it was -- anger, violence, control, power, hate -- once it was brought out into the light of day and named, it would disappear like a vestigial part of the body politic.

Instead, the once-radical idea of safe houses for
Advertisement women has become an accepted and necessary resource for most cities and towns. And physical and mental abuse has become ever more prevalent -- the murder rates alone are astounding.

For the rest of Joyce's article click here to go to the Brattleboro Reformer.