19th Women’s Film Festival March 12-21, 2010

19th Women’s Film Festival March 12-21, 2010

March in Vermont is traditionally mud season, with cold winds, waning cabin fever, and St. Patrick’s and Town Meeting Days. In Brattleboro, it has also come to mean the Women’s Film Festival, when this southern Vermont town hosts a premier event showcasing films made by women about women. Proceeds from ticket sales go to the Women’s Crisis Center, which helps women and children affected by domestic or sexual abuse.

Starting with a special benefit screening of Academy Award-nominated “Precious” on March 5th at the Latchis Theater, then continuing on March 12th and running for ten days through March 21st, Brattleboro becomes headquarters for the finest in cutting-edge, innovative, and informative film-making.

In this, the Festival’s nineteenth year, twenty-five award-winning documentaries and feature films will be presented, hailing from Colombia, Iran, Canada, South Africa, England, the United States, New Zealand, Scotland, and France. Owing to the Festival’s growing reputation, more directors than ever will be present to introduce their films.

The festival opens with “The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls,” a New Zealand film about yodeling lesbian country-western singers, called “provocative and disarming.” Other highlights of the festival include “The Beaches of Agnes,” a poignant and cinematically creative memoir by Agnès Varda, short-listed for an Academy Award; the heroic tale of an artist street-survivor, “Begging Naked;” Kim Longinotto’s “Rough Aunties,” a documentary about women in South Africa who work to save children traumatized by sexual abuse and assault, documentary-making at its finest and most inspiring; “The Jazz Baroness,” about filmmaker Hannah Rothschild’s aunt who became the benefactor of Thelonius Monk, narrated by Helen Mirren.

The Festival closes with a one-time screening of “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg,” an award-winning feature-length documentary directed by Aviva Kempner about the life of Molly Berg, a pioneer in TV comedy, weaving Berg’s personal story with the history of early television and Jewish-American life in the first half of the 20th century.

This is only a small sample of the films lined up for this year’s Festival.