Women's Film Festival

Thank You

2011-05-14T16:11:00.001-04:00

To all:

Thank You

The 2011 Women’s Film Festival celebrated its 20th Year in March. We raised just over $15,000 for the Women’s Freedom Center while enlightening and entertaining 2,700 film goers. Our venues, Latchis Theater and New England Youth Theatre were wonderful partners and helped the festival to run smoothly, and we would like to thank Darren Goldsmith, Ned Phoenix, Ben & Jerry Stockman for being responsive to our every need.

We are an entirely volunteer-organized event, and some folks, notably Steering Committee and Film Selection Committees work all year-round to make this festival what it is. We would like to acknowledge all of the volunteers, donors and sponsors, who helped make this our best year yet.
We would like to acknowledge and thank our organizing committees: Steering Committee: Marilyn Buhlmann, Kevin Burke, Gail Haines, Lissa Weinmann; Film Selection Committee: Merry Elder, Liz Hanson, Michele Immler, Donna Faith K-Brooks, Diane Laverdi;Fundraising: Ruth Austin, Marilyn Buhlmann, Lisa Jane Clarke, Robbie Paley; Banner: Siri Peterson; Best-in-Festival Coordinators: Mal Herbert & Nita Harrison; Bookkeeper/Finance/Festival Accounts: Jaki Reis & Marilyn Buhlmann; Data Compilation: Pat Halloran & Jaki Reis; Designer (Website, Program, Flyer & other print media) Kevin Burke of Pawblo, LLC & Lynn Zimmerman of Lucky Dog Design; Pass Design: Harry Saxman; Pass Distribution: Sandy Brodsky; Film Submissions: Kam Adhikary, Marilyn Buhlmann, Gail Haines, Guy Wood; Film Trackers: Gail Haines, Jaki Reis, Beth Spicer; Hospitality: Brenda Davis, Sarah Hagedorn, Lerna, Meg Lyons, Beth McKinney; Receptions: Katherine Barrett, Marilyn Chiarello, Brenda Davis, Jerry Ann Jacobs, Sherri Leining, Linda Moyse, Judith Thomas (chair), Women’s Freedom Center Board; Proofreaders: Gail Haines, Eve Ness, Rochelle Garfinkle; Program Ad Sales: Marilyn Buhlmann, Liz Kenton, Quinn Maguire Cartelli; Public Relations, Publicity, Marketing & Special Events ( Print, Radio, TV and Web Media): Robin Antepara, Mellisa Cain, Arlene Distler, Karen Henry, Nina Karp, Liz Kenton, Diane Laverdi, Louise LeGouis, Paige Martin, Linda Moyse, Michel Moyse, Anne Newsmith, Robbie Paley, Lissa Weinmann (Chair); Volunteer Coordinators (box office): Pat Halloran, Liz Kenton, Leigh Pumilia; Show Volunteers: Hannah Aleshnick, Ellice Amanna, Katherine Barratt, Hollis Carlisle, Craig Divis, Alissa Feller, Moriah Floyd, Eka Gabelia, Emma Gardner, Amanda Graff, Lyn Haas, Gail Haines, Pat Halloran, Liz Kenton, Anna Knecht, Lerna, Louise LeGouis, Sherri Leining, Tiffin Mabry, Sue Madrigan, Paige Martin, David Mischke, Susan Pelis, Jeanette Pfeifer, Pamela Reagan, Jaki, Reis, Beth Spicer, Bonnie Stearns, Kathy Urffer, Shea Witzberger, and Ellen Woodbury.

Special Events speakers & panelists and film directors & subjects: Montana Berg, Charlene & Jeffrey Chapman, Susan Edwards, Cynthia Fujikawa, VT Senator Peter Galbraith, Kate Gillespie, Liz Kenton, Dolores Klaich, Mary Murphy, Robynn Murray, Sara Nesson, Toni Ortner, Robin Rieske of Know Media, Ann Stanton of Union Institute & University, Nancy Storrow, and Meredith Wade.

Many businesses and individuals contribute financially to the festival. Our major sponsors this year were: Platinum Sponsors: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, The Kates Foundation & Latchis Theater/Brattleboro Arts Initiative; Silver Sponsors: Key Bank & Meadowlark Inn; Bronze Sponsor: Brattleboro Savings & Loan; Patrons: Bernstein & Fisk Psychotherapy Associates; Crosby House Bed & Breakfast, Dr. Elizabeth McLarney, Park Place Financial Advisors, Dr. Janet Zinter; Supporters: Brattelboro Area Farmers’ Market, Cheryl Wilfong. A special thank you to Kris McDermet who made a beautiful hooked rug based on the WFF poster of a couple of years ago and donated the proceeds of the sale.

Our community partners this year, who helped in many ways to promote the festival and bring audiences to the movies were: AIDS Project of Southern Vermont, Austine School for the Deaf, Brattleboro Retreat PTSD program personnel, Center for Digital Art, Union Institute & University & the Vermont Commission on Women who sponsored a listening forum where area women could speak out about issues that affect them here in Southern Vermont.
We also are grateful to the businesses that provided goods and services for our receptions, our special events and hospitality services for our visiting filmmakers and directors: Amy’s Bakery Arts Café, Back Side Café, Brattleboro Food Coop, Coffee Country, Elliot Street Café, Experienced Goods, Fireworks Restaurant, Flat Street Brew Pub, Front Porch Café, Grafton Village Cheese Company, Hannaford Supermarket, Landmark College Food Service, Latchis Hotel, Meadowlark Inn, New England House, Ninety Nine Restaurant, North Country Natural, Pepsi Bottling Group, Price Chopper, Putney Diner, Putney Food Coop, The Tavern Restaurant, Thai Bamboo, Three Stones Restaurant, Twilight Tea Lounge, and Vermont Country Deli.

We live in an incredibly generous community! Thank you everyone. We apologize for anyone who we left off this list. And we look forward to having additional volunteers for 2012. Please visit our webite womensfilmfestival.org and click on the volunteer link.

Thank you,
Marilyn Buhlmann & the Women’s Film Festival Steering Committee

Power and Social Norms

2011-03-17T16:49:00.014-04:00

A while ago, I wrote a blog post about female soldiers. It touched on issues of power, accountability and how power distorts accountability. I want to follow up with some more comments about power and social norms.

It is no secret that some segments of society have more power than others. Whites, males and the wealthy have more power than do minorities and women.

There are many aspects of power, and a full discussion is obviously beyond the scope of this blog. But one important aspect of power is the ability to create the assumptive framework that undergirds a culture. This is the ability to establish values and priorities, i.e., to say what is of greater or lesser importance and to assign high prestige to some roles and to devalue others.

We often tend to treat this assumptive framework as a given, often forgetting that it is biased in favor of the powerful and against those with less power.

Here's an example. In most cultures, men hold more power over women, and so define the culture's values. Values and norms are androcentric. Margaret Mead did a cross-cultural study of what activities were generally done by males and what activities were generally done by females. She found wide variation among cultures in terms of what men tended to do and what women tended to do. But one thing was consistent: What men did was more highly valued than what women did.

Take this to our own culture, and you can see why force is more highly regarded than nurturance, why football is more prestigious than cooking, and, more generally, why masculinity is seen as better than femininity. In college, in fact, I read a book by a major Spanish philospher in which he shamelessly said that women were not fully human.

These days, people may not say overtly that women are inferior. Or at least not publicly. But this tendency to devalue women has other means of expression. Women may be seen as "other". Or women may be seen as deviant. These views, of course, presuppose that the definitive human being is male.

Moreover, gender differences, legitimate or not, are interpreted so that men appear superior.

For example, if a woman is less practical than a man, she is seen as frivolous and irresponsibile. If a woman is more practical than a man, then she fails to understand male idealism

No, that issue of not understanding male idealism is not a parody. I actually read it somewhere, and it was written in all seriousness!

On the surface, these attitudes appear to be changing. But scratch the surface, and those old assumptions become visible, even in the supposedly enlightened West. It is certainly true in more traditional and conservative cultures.

I saw the film "Bhutto" last weekend. It's a documentary about the late Benazir Bhutto, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan. The film was very rich on many levels, but one scene really stood out in the context of this topic. The army asked her husband to be Prime Minister instead of her, because they did not want to salute a woman.

Many of the films of the Festival are about women achieving goals in such hostile, devaluing cultural contexts. This is what makes the Women's Film Festival so special.

So what is the take-away point of all this? It is that cultural values about gender are not value-free. They are not definitive. They came from somewhere. And that somewhere is male power -which accrues from male forcefulness and violence - and the resulting male entitlement to define women in ways that serve their own interests.

This means that these assumptions are not to be taken as axiomatic or definitive! They are to be confronted, with their assumptions and implications questioned.

Final Weekend

2011-03-17T16:28:00.004-04:00

The Women's Film Festival in Brattleboro, VT is entering its final weekend.

Marilyn Buhlmann, who heads the Festival's steering committee, reports a record turnout, with as many passes sold during the first two days than in entire previous festivals.

The closing weekend promises to be full of great films and special events.

Special events include visits by:

Robyn Murray, Iraq vet and subject of "Poster Girl", along with Sara Nesson, who directed this Academy Award nominated film.

Mary Murphy, the director of the new Harper Lee documentary.

Montana Berg, a Canadian Academy Award nominated producer.

A special family event.

The world premier of a controversial film about Marilyn Monroe.

For full descriptions of films and special events, plus other information, including venues and ticket prices, visit the Women's Film Festival website, at http://www.womensfilmfestival.org

The Issue of Power

2011-03-01T12:23:00.005-05:00

One film from last year's Women's Film Festival, To See if I'm Smiling", is going to be shown again this year. The film documents the experiences of several female Israeli soldiers. The women talk about their experiences as soldiers and also as female soldiers. Bearing witness to indignities, and even atrocities, perpetrated by their own side, they discuss the psychological and spiritual consequences they endure, both as witnesses and as active or passive collaborators.

Another blogger on this site mentioned that the film was about how power corrupts those that have it, and that got me thinking.

In war, people find themselves in dominant positions with subordinates, captives, or even civilians. We hold certain soldiers accountable for abusive behavior, yet we allow others to abuse people with impunity.

In Abu Ghraib, for instance, soldiers were reportedly ordered to abuse prisoners, yet when they did, they were sent to prison. One female soldier was separated from her baby when she was incarcerated. Yet the higher ups experienced no consequences that I know of. Were the line personnel justly punished for sadistic atrocities? Or were they scapegoated to give the illusion of ethical concern, while those in command, who gave the orders, were allowed to act with impunity?

War is full of moral confusion and collateral damage. The only way to have a safe war is to have no war. Hopefully, the time will come when this will be more than a naive utopian fantasy.

As women increasingly fill the ranks of the powerful, female subcultural values will, hopefully, balance male subcultural values, which may result in a more responsible and life-affirming culture of political leadership. And, hopefully, a culture where people are less worshipful of power, and are less corrupted by it.

OUR HISTORY

2011-02-28T21:11:00.003-05:00

The year 2011 marks the 20th year of the Women’s Film Festival (WFF) in , celebrating the lives of women all over the world. As always, the theme for the festival strives to represent the lives, relationships, struggles and triumphs of women and girls, not as victims of circumstance, but as innovators of their own realities. This March 39 films, some new and some returning, will be shown in Brattleboro. They all show women surviving and thriving in a world that often does not recognize—or accept—their gifts.

Beginning in 1992, the festival was conceived of as a perfect fundraiser and a perfect outreach program for the Women’s Crisis Center. In an interview with Christie Herbert, who was on the committee for the festival throughout its first six years of operation, said the film festival “was always not only a fundraiser, but sort of a consciousness raiser. It had both an educational outreach part to it, as well as a fundraising part to it.”

The film festival began through the inspirations and visions of the women at the Women’s Crisis Center. “I don’t think there was any event per se that began the festival,” Herbert said. “The needed money, and the WFF derived more from answering the question, ‘What would be a good fundraiser that would also support the mission of the center?’” But then, during the summer of 1992, Judith Hart Fournier was killed by an ex-lover who had followed her and a friend to a gas station and stabbed Fournier to death as she sat in her car. Herbert remembers, “It was just remarkably shocking, and a tragic situation of violence that happened against a woman.”

The current chair of the board of directors for the Women’s Freedom Center, as the center is now named, Marilyn Buhlmann, remembers that event vividly. “It really rattled the whole community. I remember there were a number of vigils. And my daughter, she was about 16, was very moved by it too. We didn’t know Judith. We were totally shocked… It was probably our community’s really most dramatic violent and visual sign of men’s violence against women.” The festival that occurred later that year was dedicated to the memory of Judith Hart Fournier and,
Buhlmann continues, meant “to point out the problems of women in the world, to point out how women survive, against a pretty steep slope.”

Long-time veteran of the festival, Merry Elder, who has volunteered every year since its inception, has helped to shape the festival through her thoughtful film choices. The festival, due to the efforts of Elder and other members of the Film Selection Committee, is now known for its high quality and high standards in both drama and documentary films. “I was called to help out with the festival. I have always been a film buff and they (the board) thought I would be interested.” The committee began by looking at blurbs for films and choosing ones that seemed to fit within the goals of the festival. Elder, with a slight chuckle, described
this method of film selection as a “very risky way to do it.”

In the first half of its existence the festival operated out of the Latchis Theater. Elizabeth Latchis would take the list of suggestions made by the committee and book what movies she could each year. Another early volunteer and former member of the board of the , Diane Leary, remembers the entire festival committee working together to research and preview films. “There was a printer in town that we would get to print up brochures,” remembers Leary. “[The festival] was smaller than it is now. We didn’t get corporate sponsorship. We didn’t get local sponsorship. It was such a small committee all we did was get the films, preview the films, and we were mostly working with Latchis Theater at that point.” After about six years the Latchis Theater’s commitment to the festival became too much for them, and Elizabeth Latchis said ‘no more.’

The split from Latchis became an opportunity for the festival to continue in a new direction and provided an avenue to entirely reinvent the festival. As a result, the festival became a lot more work. “We didn’t even realize what we were getting ourselves into,” Elder stated as she shook her head. The year after the split from the Latchis, the festival held on by a thin thread in 1999, showing just three films. The following year, after a revamping of the festival and a recreation of the committees, the WFF survived and began thriving in the Brattleboro community. Another long-term volunteer, Arlene Distler, who has chaired the festival and is a member of the publicity committee, became a part of the volunteer force the last year that the festival was supported by the work of Elizabeth Latchis. “It was an interesting transition to an all-volunteer run festival. It took a lot of work. And people burn out.”

The reputation of the film festival is growing by leaps and bounds and it has become a widely anticipated annual event for the residents of Windham County. The survival of the festival is credited to the efforts of the volunteers, but also to the valuable viewers of the films. Distler is grateful for some of the films she has viewed and time she has spent with the festival. “I’ve had people say to me that the films they have seen at the festival have changed their lives. For myself, it certainly has broadened my perspective…The festival has helped me see that we are all so much more connected at what we go through than what one would think.”When asked if the film festival has stayed true to the original goal, Christie Herbert replied, “Yes, I think it has transcended it. It was just a great idea, in a really great community that supported it.”

Poster Girl Nomination

2011-02-25T08:13:00.003-05:00

Sunday is a big night for Robynn Murray and Sara Nesson a couple of the many film folks coming to Brattleboro the weekend of March 19 and 20 as part of the fest's 20th anniversary special events. On Sunday they will be attending the Academy Awards to see if their film "Poster Girl" wins 'Best Short Documentary.' Just being nominated is honor enough, and this 38-minute film about a high school cheerleader and national merit scholar who volunteers for service and ends up a machine gunner in Iraq deserves the praise. This film is powerful, compelling and important. It should be required viewing for everyone because it depicts what life is like for a growing number of young vets returning from war with health and life challenges those of us who stayed comfortable at home can never imagine. Robynn is the subject of the film. Director Sara Nesson found her when she was shooting a film about vets healing themselves through art. Robynn was featured on a poster for an army publication featuring female vets, and now she is a poster girl for how vets cope with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Vermont has become a national center for the treatment of PTSD. The Brattleboro Retreat just opened a clinic for uniformed service personnel and the national center for PTSD of the Veterans Administration is in White River Junction. Sara and Robynn are amazing people with a story to tell. I look forward to hearing it when they come to the New England Theatre for the 4pm screening of Poster Girl (shown after "To See if I'm Smiling" (60 min), an Israeli film about female soldiers, but more about how abject power corrupts souls).

More from the Womens Film Festival

2011-02-09T13:00:00.004-05:00

From March 11-20, 2011, Brattleboro, Vermont will host the 20th annual Women's Film Festival.

The festival presents films by and about women, showing women's strengths, aspirations, accomplishments, struggles and tragedies.

One film, which will have its world primiere showing at the Festival, is the documentary My Marilyn. This film shows how Marilyn Monroe became both Hollywoods greatest star and its most vulnerable icon.

Another film, To See if I'm Smiling, presents the frank testimonies of six female Israeli soldiers, who describe how gender, ethics and moral responsibility intersect during war.

Another film, Bhutto, describes the life and legacy of Benazir Bhutto, the first woman to lead a Muslim nation.

39 films are scheduled. Films will be shown at two venues, the historic Latchis Theater and the modern New England Youth Theater.

Several films will be followed by panel discussions.

The Women's Film Festival is run entirely by volunteers. All proceeds go to the Women's Freedom Center (formally known as the Women's Crisis Center). The Women's Freedom Center assists women and their children victimized by domestic violence. It serves the greater Brattleboro area with vital services that, sadly, remain desperately needed.

Announcing the 2011 Lineup!

2011-01-19T17:39:00.001-05:00

Women's Film Festival Announces Line-Up for 20th Anniversary with
More Eclectic, Exciting Films than Ever Before

January, 2011, Brattleboro, Vermont: The Women’s Film Festival (WFF) of Brattleboro, Vermont, the longest-running women’s film festival in New England and one of the oldest in the country devoted to films by and about women, announced its special 2011 20th Anniversary line-up today with more entertaining and illuminating films than ever before– films that raise awareness of the struggles, accomplishments and creativity of women around the corner and around the globe. A full list of film and blurbs can be found at the WFF website at www.womensfilmfestival.org.

This year the festival is bigger than ever: Over 10 days in March (Women’s History Month) 39 films will be screened at the historic art-deco Latchis Theater and the modern New England Youth Theater in Downtown Brattleboro, a cultural magnet town voted one of the top 25 small cities for art in America by American Style magazine.

The festival opens on Friday, March 11 with “Women Without Men” a surreal and exquisite drama from Iranian-American filmmaker and artist Shirin Neshat and closes on Sunday, March 20th with the world premiere of Allan Holzman’s “My Marilyn,” examining the dark psychological corners of Marilyn Monroe’s life.

An opening gala will be held during Brattleboro’s monthly Gallery Walk on Friday, March 4 where women’s digital art and an overview of upcoming films will be spotlighted at the Latchis Theater. On Saturday, March 26, the festival will officially close with a repeat showing of the ‘Best of Fest’ audience favorite and new high school video competition winners at the New England Youth Theater.

First-time screenings include: “Bhutto,” which will include a post-film discussion (Sunday March 13 4:00 pm) with Vermont State Senator and diplomat Peter Galbraith, a close friend of the slain Pakistani leader; “Poster Girl,” a hard-hitting documentary about a high school cheerleader turned gunner in Iraq shortlisted for an Oscar nomination; as well as films that deal with family issues, the environment, food, aging, art and many other topics. Several films will be accompanied by Q&As with directors and experts following the screenings.

To celebrate its 20th year, the 2011 WFF will also devote some screenings to the best films of festivals past, such as the acclaimed musical-drama “Joanna D’Arc of Mongolia” (featured on the festival poster), audience favorites “I, Doll, The Story of Barbie,” “Heart of the Sea” and Agnes Varda’s acclaimed “The Gleaners and I.”

This is the first year WFF is collaborating with the Center for Digital Art to highlight women’s digital art and mount a national “Min Vid” competition through You Tube for high school students. There will be cash prizes and special screenings awarded to the top
entries illuminating the theme ‘Woman’ in less than two minutes. Details on entry can be found at the Women’s Film Festival website under the heading “High School Video Contest.”

The festival is unique in that it is fully volunteer run and 100% of proceeds benefit the Women’s Crisis Center, a non-profit organization that helps women and children from southern Vermont and surrounding areas protect themselves against domestic violence while educating the community about everyone’s role in stopping the cycle of violence all around us.

WFF chooses films over the winter through a committee process that offers a final roster of cream-of-the-crop features and cutting-edge documentaries from festivals around the world; and a call-for-entries that yields surprising gems. Over the years the festival has had area premiers for much-lauded films such as "Born Into Brothels" and "Bend It Like Beckham"; numerous films screened at the festival have gone on to receive Academy-Award nominations.

In 2010 the WFF received a prestigious grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to provide free access to members of youth, elder and multi-cultural organizations, bringing greater diversity to festival audiences.

Brattleboro itself is reason enough to come and celebrate WFF’s 20th year. Nestled in the Green Mountains in the south-east corner of the state only two hours from Boston and three hours from New York City, this creative hub features its own art museum, fine restaurants, unique boutiques, four independent bookstores, and many other arts venues. One may enjoy the charm of the town while taking in top-notch film fare that may never make it to the local multiplex. The manageable size of the festival makes it a stress-free experience that offers a roster of women’s films unsurpassed by larger festivals in big cities.

The festival should come with a warning: whether you are a man or woman -- you will not leave unmoved! Tickets can be purchased ahead of time. Full details, the film line-up and a continually updated calendar of events related to the WFF can be found at the Women’s Film Festival website at www.womensfilmfestival.org.

Womens Film Festival Soiree

2010-09-16T19:01:00.002-04:00

WOMEN’S FILM FESTIVAL KICKS-OFF PLANNING FOR 20TH ANNIVERSARY

WITH VOLUNTEER SOIREE

Brattleboro, Vermont: September 14, 2010. People interested in volunteering to be
part of one of Vermont’s most noteworthy events -- the annual Women’s Film Festival
– on its historic 20th anniversary are invited to attend a Volunteer Soiree’ on Monday,
20 September 2010 from 6:00 to 8:30 pm at the Marlboro Graduate Center, Room 2 East, 28 Vernon
Road, in Downtown Brattleboro. Food and beverages will be served, a short film
showed and volunteer and internship opportunities discussed.

The 20th annual Women’s Film Festival will run from March 11 through 20, 2011 at
the Latchis Theater and the New England Youth Theater in Downtown Brattleboro.

Google ‘womens film festival’ and the Women’s Film Festival in Brattleboro comes up
first and for good reason. It is the longest running women’s film festival in the nation
and is internationally recognized for the breadth and quality of films presented each
year.

The festival is also important – and unique – in that 100% of proceeds support the
Women’s Crisis Center which, for more than 30 years, has helped free women and
children from the painfully common cycle of domestic violence.

“The festival is 100 percent volunteer-run,” Marilyn Buhlmann, chairperson of the
Women’s Film Festival Steering Committee and Chair of the Board of Directors of
the Women’s Crisis Center said. “People who attend the soiree will explore exciting
opportunities to express their talents while helping others.”

Volunteer and academic internships are available in the following areas: Publicity,
marketing and design, volunteer coordination, special events, hospitality, art show and
silent auction, bookkeeping and budget, administrative support, corporate and individual

sponsorship and fundraising and film selection.

Those who cannot come to the Soiree and would like more information, including job
descriptions, should visit the film festival website at www.womensfilmfestival.org or
contact Gail Haines at 802 387-5676 or gail@svcable.net.

Thank You

2010-04-25T13:53:00.001-04:00

The Women’s Film Festival would like to thank everyone who attended our 2010 festival and all of the businesses, organizations and individuals who continue to offer support and enthusiasm for this annual event which benefits The Women’s Crisis Center. The festival is truly a group effort; one that includes dozens of sponsors, donors and volunteers.

This year’s festival was made possible by The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences; The Kates Foundation; Latchis Theater/Brattleboro Arts Initiative; Hooker Dunham Theater and Gallery; Key Bank; Brattleboro Food Co op; Brattleboro Museum & Art Center; The Brattleboro Retreat; Chroma Technology; Brattleboro Savings and Loan; Clear solutions; Dr. Elizabeth McLarney; Planned Parenthood of Northern New England; Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity;Bernstein & Fisk Psychotherapy Associates; Dr. Mary Bove/ Brattleboro Naturopathic Clinic; Peter Havens; Brattleboro Area Farmers Market; Melissa Hayes; Park Place Financial Advisors; Richards Insurance Group; Cheryl Wilfong; The Austine School; Brattleboro Housing Authority; Tapestry; Westgate Tenant’s Association; Department of Youth Services; Nancy Groff/ Vermont Interpreter Referral Services; ASL interpreter, Bridgit Paradis; Randy Susan Meyers; Harry Saxman; The Putney Co-op; Landmark College; Putney Inn; North Country Naturals; Someone’s in the Kitchen; Vermont Country Deli; Amy’s Bakery & Arts Café; Side Hill Farms; Chai Wallah; Domino’s Pizza; Fireworks Grill; Grafton Village Cheese; Riverview Café; TJ Buckley’s; Cappella Clausura and Suzanne d’Corsey and, of course, to all of our loyal and hard working volunteers- this festival would truly not exist without you.

Special thanks go to the Steering Committee and Film Selection Committees who labor all year round to produce this event; to our Publicity folks - who got our name out far and wide; to our excellent web site and new media committee who brought us reluctantly into the world of Google documents, Twitter, FaceBook et al and especially to Kristin Wilson for her tireless work on our website; to our fund-raising /grant committee who acquired much needed funding; the Visions Art Show crew for organizing a wonderful venue for local artists; BethAnn Agostini for her invaluable legal advice; the show volunteer committee and all the show volunteers - who made sure there were people to sell tickets and welcome film goers; and to the dozens of other volunteers from hospitality, film trackers and marketing to proofreaders, Best in Fest and data compilation - we are very grateful for you all.

Finally, our gratitude and awe go to the many courageous and strong women in the world who are making their own lives and the lives of many others better, by winning over unsurmountable odds. And to the creative and insightful film makers and directors who tell their stories.

Kris Alden

Best in Fest Party

2010-03-23T12:53:00.000-04:00

Women’s Film Festival “Best of Fest” Party

The Women’s Film Festival invites you to their gala closing party on Saturday, March 27th at Hooker Dunham Theater. The festivities begin at 6 PM with a celebration of our very successful festival; delicious food and drinks, a chance to make your final (or first) bid on some wonderful art, the long awaited drawing for our fabulous festival prizes, including passes to the 2011 Film Festival; autographed copies of the internationally acclaimed novel; The Murderer’s Daughters by Randy Susan Meyers; an assortment of incredible Side Hill Farm jams; a basket of scrumptious goodies from Someone’s in the Kitchen plus the most popular film of this year’s festival: The Topp Twins! This film sold out at both previous showings so come early to get a seat and join us in our celebration. The Topp Twins will be shown at 7:30 PM. Food, Art, Prizes and the Topp Twins!

What more could you want?

Cappella Clausura

2010-02-23T10:11:00.000-05:00

Cappella Clausura: Sacred Music by Women Composers

Sunday, March 28, 2010, 4:30 pm First Baptist Church, 190 Main St., Brattleboro

In honor of Women's History Month, and in collaboration with WFF and "Visions" art show, Cappella Clausura will present a program benefiting the local Women's Crisis Center. Cappella Clausura is a women's vocal ensemble of music professionals from the Boston area. Their Brattleboro program includes works by contemporary composers Patricia Van Ness and Hilary Tann, as well as Hildegard von Bingen from the early 1100s, late Renaissance composers Sulpitia Cesis and Raphaella Aleotti, and Baroque composers Chiara Cozzolani (whose five-movement Messa Paschale is threaded throughout) and Orsina Vizzana. Some pieces will include accompaniment on portative organ, viola da gamba, and theorbo (a lute-like instrument).

Tickets: $18, including a $5 donation to the Women's Crisis Center. This event is supported in part by a New England States Touring grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts, as well as a $500 "challenge grant" from composer Patsy Rogers, a former Brattleboro-area resident and supporting member of Friends of Music.

There will be a preconcert lecture by composer Hilary Tann. For further information on the Tann presentation and the concert, call: 802-254-3600, or go to www.fomag.org.

The Cappella Clausura website is www.clausura.org http://www.clausura.org>

Events at the Womens Film Festival

2010-02-11T00:34:00.003-05:00

Visions Art Show:

March 5th On view at the Hooker-Dunham Theater & Gallery

Another special feature of the Festival—“Visions,” a show of women’s art and craft, with proceeds from the month-long silent auction also going to the Crisis Center. The show opens on Gallery Walk Friday, March 5th.

The Moon Inside You: Q&A with Director Diana Fabianova by Skype

March 13, Sat. 18:30:00 Hooker-Dunham Theater

Talk with the Director Diana Fabianova in Slovakia who will be on the screen through Skype after the film.
(women's health, menstruation)

Quest for Honor: Q&A with Director Mary Ann Smothers Bruni

March 13, Sat 19:00:00 Brattleboro Museum and Art Center

Mary Ann Sothers Bruni, just back from Iraq will be here for Q&A after the film. A photographer, this is her first film.
(Kurdish Iraq violence against women, women activists)

Kaziah: The Goat Woman: Q&A with Director Amy Duzinski Janes

March 14, Sun. 13:00:00 Brattleboro Museum and Art Center

Amy Duzinski Janes, Director coming from California will be here along with a new painting by Kaziah, of local fallen soldier Kyle Gilbert to be presented to family.
(Art, grief, farming)

Glass House: Q&A with Producer Melissa Hibbard

March 18 Thurs. 18:30:00 Latchis Theater

March 19, Fri. 10:00:00 Room 101, International Center, School for International Training

Producer, Melissa Hibbard will be on hand for Q&A after the film.
(Iran social issues, young women and teens)

Motherland: Q&A with Director Jennifer Steinman

March 20, Sat 13:00:00 Latchis Theater

Director Jennifer Steinman here from California will be available for Q&A after the film.
(mother's grief)

Orgasm Inc: Q&A with Director Liz Canner

March 20, Sat 18:30:00 Latchis Theater

Vermont Director Elizabeth Canner will be here for Q&A after the film.
(women's health, pharmaceutcal politics)

Closing Party:

On Saturday, March 27th, a festive closing party will include the final evening of bidding on the artwork in the “Visions” exhibit and a screening of the film chosen by festival-goers as “the Best of the Fest."

Cappella Clausura:

Finally, on Sunday, March 28th, the Women’s Film Festival welcomes Boston's Cappella Clausura: Sacred Music by Women Composers, performing a special benefit concert for the Women's Crisis Center.

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

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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.

BEST OF FEST

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Best of the Fest is "Pray The Devil Back to Hell", a documentary directed by Gini Riticker, 72 mins., about the women who took over the seat of government in Liberia.

It will be shown at the Hooker Dunham on Saturday, March 28th at 7:00,followed by Best in Fest runner-up, "Who Does She Think She Is?", at about 8:15, a film about women artists struggling to be both artists and raise their children.

And don't forget final bidding on art in the Visions show happens between 5:30 and 7:00, same place, while enjoying WFF's catered refreshments.

Final WFF Event!

2009-03-23T17:27:00.000-04:00

The 18th Women’s Film Festival Closing Party and Visions Silent Auction final bidding on March 28th

Visions, a non-juried show and silent auction of painting, sculpture, and fine crafts by women from the Brattleboro area will receive final bids between 5:30 to 7:00 at the 2009 Women’s Film Festival Best-in-Fest Closing Party on Saturday, March 28th., at the Hooker-Dunham Theater & Gallery.

Diverse and multigenerational in nature, professional and amateur artists alike, the Visions art show exhibits a true kaleidoscope of women’s creative spirits. Proceeds from the auction will benefit the Women’s Crisis Center.

A wonderful array of refreshments will be served.

Following final bidding, at 7:00, there will be a screening of the film that wins the viewer choice award. Check the website: For more information you may call 257-0098.

Check back here Thursday for the winning film!

Some Audience Responses to the WFF

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An experiment taping audience responses on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at the WFF using a low tech flip video camera. Sound and picture quality a bit poor but as you continue to watch, the conversation picks up some momentum and shows audience engagement with the films. Thank you ladies for sharing your candid thoughts and feelings!

Posted by Jacqueline Gens

MORNING AFTER, March 23, 2009 by Joyce Marcel

2009-03-23T12:01:00.000-04:00

The films have been shown. The cards have been filled out. With slightly blurry vision and yet elevated consciousness, we await word on which movie will be chosen "Best of The Fest."

Remember, there's a closing party and a final screening of your top choice, along with the closing of the "Visions" silent art auction, at the Hooker-Dunham on Saturday, March 28 at 5:30 p.m.

Here's my personal summary:

Number of films seen: 15 out of 27. I thought I had seen almost all of them, so this final count surprises me.

Personal choice for "Best of the Fest": "La Corona." I've been thinking about why I loved this film, and I've decided that part of it is because, for the time being, victimization is over for the women in the film. There are few men in their lives. There is little violence. We get to see them moving on, even if it's in a desperate pit of a place like a maximum security female prison in Bogota, Colombia. We see their joy and their striving for something better, even if it's only a crown in a prison beauty pageant. The film really centers on the women's personalities, and some of them are unforgettable.

Second choice: "Rain," just because it was so beautifully shot, so wonderfully acted, so honest, and because it tells us something we may not have wanted to know about the underbelly of life in the Bahamas.

Third choice: "Pray the Devil Back to Hell." Even though we have to endure war, rape, theft, brutal dictators and all the rest in the first half of this film, it has a happy ending. So far.

Heroines I had never known about but whom I now adore: Patsy Mink, who brought us Title IX, and the women of "Pray the Devil Back to Hell."

Most unforgettable film: "20 Seconds of Joy." Just because of the amazing footage of Karina Hollekim flying off of one cliff after another. No matter what I might think of adrenaline junkies, the footage makes me feel like I'm flying, and that's thrilling. I'll never understand Hollekim and her friends, but I'll never forget them, either. And I'll probably never stop screaming whenever she jumps off a cliff.

Best historical story: "Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm." This film, with its strange camera angles and unfortunate reenactments, is not a good film. But I love the story. Here's to the female orgasm, whenever and wherever you find it. (Hint: usually somewhere around the clitoris.)

Film genre I appreciated the most: The documentaries about artists. Alice Neel, Kay Ryan, Patti Smith, the creative women of "Who Does She Think She Is" -- It was important for me, as a writer, to watch other artists and their struggles.

Film I wish I had been strong enough to see: "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo." It wasn't just me. I was in the New England Youth Theater on Wednesday, and after "To See If I'm Smiling," which is brutal enough, almost the entire audience walked out before this film. It's just too much pain, I think. Does that make me a coward? Yes.

Film I enjoyed least: "'Bama Girl." Who cares who becomes homecoming queen at the University of Alabama? Not worth 75 minutes of my time.

Ripped from the headlines: "To See If I'm Smiling," the film about female Israeli soldiers coming to terms with their own inhumanity, anger and cruelty. I saw it just days before the men of the Israeli army publicly did the same thing.

And that's it. It's time to thank the Women's Film Festival once again for giving me the chance to write this blog, to thank Jacqueline Gens for her complete excellence in running the site, to thank you all for reading, and a special thanks to those of you who commented.

Say goodbye, Joyce.

Goodbye, Joyce.

SUNDAY March 22, 2009 by Joyce Marcel

2009-03-22T15:51:00.001-04:00

My pick for "Best of Fest" is "La Corona," a film that unexpectedly swept me away. Don't really have a reason; with films, it's all intuitive, isn't it? You're watching something and at some point you realize you're feeling, "Wow! This is great!"

So I'm happy to report that "La Corona" will be shown an extra time today, along with "La Americana," at the 6:30 p.m. program at the Hooker-Dunham Theater.

RAIN by Maria Govan

Other than "A Sense of Wonder," in which Kaiulani Lee writes and then performs the words of Rachel Carson in two of Carson's own homes, "Rain" is the only fictional film I've encountered at the festival. And I loved it.

With documentaries, the discovery (or the lack of - see my comments on "Bama Girl" on Saturday) of the story and the deep truth of it depend on realism.

In a fictional narrative, the director is free to set up the shots. So "Rain" is beautiful frame by frame and shot by shot. Govan uses the colors of the Bahamas to stunning effect, so that her characters are often seen solo against large and luscious swaths of color - the turquoise of the Caribbean, the crumbling yellow wall of a church, the white of the sand.

"Rain" is the story of a lithe young girl named Rain who grows up - painfully innocent - on small, bucolic Ragged Island in the Bahamas, and comes to the big city - in this case Nassau Town - in search of her mother after the loving grandmother who has raised her dies.

The mother, Glory, turns out to be a crack whore living in a world of numbers running, dice-playing, AIDS and drugs. The neighborhood is called "The Graveyard," because no one ever leaves.

Yes, it's a different Bahamas than the one you see from the bloated white cruise ships in the harbor, which seem more like large wormy maggots than pleasure boats in this film.
In fact, in one scene, a preacher warns his congregation - big-hatted black women and besuited men - that dreaded homosexuality comes to the Bahamas on these boats. My instinct was to shake him by the collar of his shiny suit and yell, "You've got people smoking crack in your own community, you dork. You've got AIDS. Wake up to the real dangers here!"

Glory herself is almost completely sunk into a world of hurt. She does not know or care about herself. Her eyes are vacant. Her mouth is open and bewildered. She's lost.

Then this young girl arrives and finally awakens her maternal and self-protective instincts.

Glory is played by a wonderful actress, Nicki Micheaux, who is giving the performance of a lifetime here. When she describes how she gave birth to Rain, squatting alone in a pouring rain, it's absolutely thrilling.

Rain can run, and she finally finds some comfort and nurturing from her track coach, CCH Pounder, a fine actress who shows up often on American television. And speaking of good performances, the grandmother is the richly warm Irma P. Hall. Even the great Bahamanian-American actor Calvin Lockhart has a part - his last before he died.

In fact, newcomer Renel Brown, who plays Rain, is the only one whose emotions appear impenetrable. But that may be because she is a young girl playing a young girl who is being bombarded with negative impressions and is trying to absorb and process them.

In fact, all the acting is remarkable here. You're even impressed by the evil crazy guy who tries to rape Rain - but doesn't succeed.

This is the first feature film from Govan, who was born in the Bahamas and has done several documentaries.

She "examines how different generations of women both support and destroy each other, and reveals how an oppressed community can still find something to hold sacred," writes Jane Schoettle at the Toronto Film Festival Site (http://tiff08.ca/filmsandschedules/films/rain.) "At the same time, she explores the emotional life of a young black girl who must find inner direction and strength while drifting in a world hostile to her.

"With a strong visual aesthetic and an even stronger cast, Rain shakes off our postcard perceptions of Bahamian life to show us the beauty and dark complexity that lies between Ragged Island and the Nassau few tourists see. That it does this with depth, delicacy and nuance makes for a rewarding audience experience, and marks Govan as a talent to watch."

Video interviews with some of the cast can be found at http://www.movingpicturesmagazine.com.

This was a beautiful film, as well as an emotional roller-coaster ride. In fact, I was so overtaken by this one that I made it the only film I saw on Saturday.

Trailer for La Americana

2009-03-21T13:55:00.001-04:00

LA AMERICANA *filmmaker Q&A*
6:30 Hooker-Dunham Theater

SATURDAY March 21, 2009 by Joyce Marcel

2009-03-21T13:47:00.000-04:00

Well, it's finally happened!

Every year, some film comes along that makes me fall in love. I never know which one it's going to be. It's certainly never the ones I preview at home. For some reason, it's always one of the ones I've never heard of, or which don't sound too promising, or I have to force myself to see. And then boom! I'm swept away.

Last year it was "Time to Die." Last night it happened with "La Corona."

I also have a film I'd like to name as "shuck of the season," but I'll get to that in a minute.

As a note, the Hooker-Dunham (did anyone else go to the New England Youth Theater first, like I did?) was packed for the 6:30 films. The volunteers had to put out extra chairs. The audience seemed to be split between men and woman, which is a great thing. And there was a line out the door for the 8:30 vibrator movie, "The Passion and Power."

It's more fun when a lot of people show up.

LA CORONA ("The Crown") by Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega

This film, subtitled, about a two-day beauty pageant in a maximum security prison in Bogota, Colombia, was nominated for a 2007 Academy Award in the best short documentary category. For more about it, go to: http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/lacorona/synopsis.html

El Buen Pastor (The Good Shepherd) prison is a pit. But once a year, with the misgivings of its tough-as-nails female warden, each cell block nominates a candidate for "reina," or queen. Then the six nominated convicts - a hired killer and a few armed robbers among them - prepare and then compete as if it was a regular beauty pageant.

"It gives them a glimmer of hope," says Laisa, a Colombian soap opera star and pageant judge. "For a moment they feel like they are free."
Two women stand out. Maira is the hired killer. "I have killed, many times," she says. She's serving eight years. The most conventional beauty, she lost the crown last year and is very determined.

Angela has darker skin and is more lively than the others. Her husband was murdered with "five bullets in his head." She's in for robbery and assault, mostly grocery stores, and is finishing up a three-year sentence. Her life may have been hard, but there's a light inside her that is missing in the others. "You have to have a lot of balls to do this," she says.

The filmmakers struggled with access, but you would never know it. We see and feel life as it is lived in the prison - shared cells with rickety televisions, dreadful food, lots of bars and locked doors.

We watch as the contestants practice. We see the cellblock residents become cheering squads for their chosen representatives. We watch as the warden gets involved and loves every minute of it. (She also seems to love Maira.)

There's a casual and elegant acceptance of lesbian relationships in prison and also in the film. "God said to love one another; He never said who," Angela says.

There's a talent contest - the six contestants do national dances, some of them with male prison guards.

The costumes and dresses are loaned. The makeup and hair people are professionals brought in for the event. The judges are minor league celebrities. The Colombia media covers the two-day pageant.

The contestants have to answer difficult questions. Maira stumbles over "If you were president of the country for a day, what would you do for the children." Who wouldn't stumble over that one?

A delighted Angela wins the crown. For a moment, Maira looks like she would kill again. Then she breaks down in tears. "Don't worry," says the warden, embracing her. "You're the prettiest. Don't forget, you're the prettiest."

The residents of the losing cellblocks adjust to the loss. "The judges are corrupt," say some. "They chose the black girl," say the racists. "It was fixed," say others.

One month later, Angela's time in prison is over. The cameras return to watch her embrace her tearful lover and go through the heavy metal gates. We see her walking alone down a dark, empty street, pulling her suitcase with the crown and the scepter behind her. No one meets her. She is fragile and absolutely alone. It breaks your heart.

The film ends on a simple note (spoiler alert): "In memory of Angela, who was murdered in the streets of Bogota soon after her release."

This film moved me. It offers so much life and energy, so many interesting characters, so many things to think about.

It's been shown on HBO. It can't be rented from Netflix. But you should find a way to see this film.

Think and Discuss: Beauty pageants? Really?

'BAMA GIRL by Rachel Goslins

For me, this was the most disappointing film of the festival (so far - we have two days to go). At 75 minutes, it was way too long. The McGuffin (see Hitchock) was not worth pursuing - who cares who's going to be homecoming queen at the University of Alabama?

But worse, the film did not deliver on its promise - a racial breakthrough, a black girl as homecoming queen for the first time in decades.

This is how the film is pitched: "A charismatic black woman at the University of Alabama runs for Homecoming Queen, going up against a century of privilege, tradition, segregation, and a secret association of all-white fraternities. Despite all this, Jessica Thomas is determined to win the crown."

This is what it was: "Say yes to Jess" mounts a determined campaign to be homecoming queen. "My face is different from the rest," she says. She's certainly a confident woman, very motivated and very smart. She doesn't win, but she's one of the "court" - the four runner-ups. Also in the court: a girl of Indian descent, another African-American, and an independent (not a sorority girl). So it's not really about race, is it?

This film is an advertisement for Jess's future career in broadcasting, nothing more.

Even though the film is set up within a racial context - we see the traditional snarling dogs, the headlines about the four little girls who were blown up in the church, Rev. Martin Luther King leading a march, even a (staged?) shot of Rosa Parks on a bus - this late in the game, white exclusivity is a ship that has passed.

Jess belongs to one of several African-American sororities. Indian and Asian students abound. OK, one white fraternity sponsors an "Old South" weekend with Confederate uniforms and hoop skirts. But this is Alabama; what do we expect? Raised consciousness? Really?

The only real subtext this film finds, and it finds it too late, is "the machine." This is a secret 50-year tradition of white male (and later female) domination that supposedly controls the school. Born long ago - and still thriving in the white fraternities and sororities - the members of the machine decide who will win each school election, whether it is for homecoming queen or for student government. Their candidates win because they have the power of organized voting blocks.

What makes this in any way noteworthy is that these machine members go on to run the government of Alabama and influence the government of the United States. Lawyers, judges, congressmen, senators and mayors are among them. But you will find this kind of thing at almost every school harboring a wealthy and entitled majority. A far more interesting documentary would focus on it, alone.

Or on Skull & Bones at Yale, for example. That secret society produced the worst president ever.

Back to the film. After 75 minutes of endless campaigning, and after 4,600 people vote, the homecoming queen turns out to be the only bland sorority blonde with too-white teeth in the contest.

OK, point made. But really, why should we care?

Let's call this one the "shuck of the season" and leave the thinking and discussing for another day.

FRIDAY, March 20, 2009 by Joyce Marcel

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This is a time of sadness for filmmakers and film fanatics both, because of the untimely and unnecessary death of the gifted actress Natasha Richardson.

Many have commented on her wonderful performances, but I'm haunted now by a film in which she didn't appear.

In "Love Actually," one of the best chickflix of all times, Liam Neeson, Richardson's husband, plays a man whose wife has just died, leaving behind a small boy for him to raise alone. We see the two at the funeral, and we watch as the they try to carry on with their lives. We even get to watch both of them fall in love.

Neeson's performance is so moving, his pain is so real, his heartbreak so convincing, that it's hard not to imagine the kind of pain he's feeling now. We've already experienced something like that with him.

Our hearts go out to the Redgrave, Richardson and Neeson families.

On a happier note, I'm delighted to report that credit for the one-minute, all-female, high-energy, thoroughly enjoyable opener at each screening of the festival belongs to our own Merry Elder. Great job!

TO SEE IF I'M SMILING by Tamar Yarom

If you want some additional insight into the American women at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, see this heartbreaking Israeli film.

I saw it on Wednesday evening. On Thursday morning, the news broke that several Israeli soldiers were claiming to the newspapers that "Palestinian civilians were killed and Palestinian property intentionally destroyed" during the recent offensive in the Gaza Strip. (http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/03/19/israel.gaza.idf)

According to reports I heard on the BBC, the complaints were made to the Israeli Defense Forces two weeks ago. But the IDF only opened its investigation a few hours after the papers hit the street on Thursday.

"Israeli Defense minister Ehud Barak told Army Radio Thursday that 'Israel has the most moral army in the world' and that the testimonies will be checked carefully," according to CNN.

Ehud Barak needs to see this movie.

Made in 2007, the documentary features the stories of six young women who served in the IDF - a two-year rotation is mandatory for all 18-year-old Israeli youth, male and female.

Yarom has included a lot of footage of the IDF at the West Bank and Gaza. The borders are like your worst images of high-security prisons - tall walls, turrets, guns, barbed wire, bright lights, barriers.

Some Israelis say of their country, "A good country in a bad neighborhood," but clearly, Israel has not been a very good neighbor.

And if you believe the propaganda that Israel is only doing what it has to do to defend itself, note that the IDF has guns, rockets, armor and tanks and seem to be fighting a people armed mostly with rocks and soda cans.

The women in the film are haunted by their personal experiences with power, rage and cruelty - experiences which, as women, are new to them.

One woman, a border policewoman named Libi, talks about her anger when a friend of hers was killed, and how she took it out by tormenting, for hours, a group of 70 or 80 innocent Arabs who were unlucky enough to be crossing a border when she was in charge.

"I stood them in a line and decided that they would stay with me for the whole 12- to 14-hour shift, in the sun, in the heat," she says. "I made them stand there with me and had them do all kinds of exercises."

A few years later, we see her playing with her small child. She seems to be happy; so does the infant. But then she turns to the camera and confesses that every now and then, even when she is with her baby, she is consumed by a rage so powerful that she cannot control it. And she talks about "the unbearable lightness of death."

But the deepest scars and the most depressing story come from Meytal, a woman whose face is so young and fresh that it makes you think of strawberries.

She chose to be a medic to save lives and be where the action is.

Yet in one of her tales, she is assigned to wash a decaying corpse so that the Palestinians, when they get it back, will not be able to tell that it bled to death.

But the worst comes later. She can hardly believe it herself as she talks. One day she encounters an Arab corpse with an erection. She is amused. She squats next to it and asks a colleague to take her picture.

Then she tries to erase what she did from her mind. Thanks to Yarom, who must have tracked down the friend, a few years later Meytal, "To see if I'm smiling," confronts - on camera - the photo.

And, of course, she cries.

I am a firm supporter of Israel and it's right to exist and thrive. But I hate what it has become. The borders haunt me.

Think and Discuss: When we, as Jews, said "Never again," didn't we mean that genocide would never happen again? Or is it only genocide against us?

Some Pictures from WFF Opening Reception

2009-03-19T22:42:00.000-04:00

Kamana Adhikiry hangs the Visions art show at Hooker-Dunham Theater & Gallery

Kris Alden, festival organizer, and Sue Lederer, Women’s Cris Center board and WFF organizer, on opening night

Ami Maglin, WFF Volunteer coordinator chair, and ticket sellers, opening night

THURSDAY March 19, 2009 by Joyce Marcel

2009-03-19T17:32:00.000-04:00

PRAY THE DEVIL BACK TO HELL
A Film by Gini Reticker

Now begins the outrage films. I have to admit, I've been avoiding them. But this one, God bless it, is both outrage and joy.

Last year we loved "Iron Ladies of Liberia," which told the story of the rise to power of the first elected female president of an African county.

"Pray the Devil Back to Hell" is the back story. President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is only seen at the end.

Before we get to her, we have to go through the usual outrages: children going hungry; the rape of women as a political tool as well as one male entitlement; theft; warlords; child soldiers who haven't a clue what they're really doing; greed (diamonds); power struggles; and the big one - endless war.

There are scenes of children playing with skulls - real ones.

The women of Liberia suffered through all of this for decades. One woman tells us a story that sums it up. She met a woman who had been in her home when the soldiers broke in. They lined up her, her 12- or 13-year-old daughter who had just started menstruating, and her husband, and told the woman to dance, clap and sing a particular song. Then they started raping the daughter. Then they told the woman to look to her side. There she watched other soldiers slowly - repeat, slowly - cutting her husband's throat. The woman who told this story to the camera was crying when she said many months later, when she met the woman, she was still dancing, clapping and singing the same song.

And yes, by the way, the daughter got pregnant.

There's a lot of footage of the soldiers from both sides, of the warlords, of the dictator Charles Taylor. It's hard not to start hating all the men in the world for letting this happen. It's especially hard when one of the warlords, at the peace talks, for God's sake, says that they want to kill all the people in the capital city of Monrovia, then bring in some women and repopulate. Speechless, are you? You should be.

The women of Liberia had had enough. Led by the amazing Leymah Gbowee, they banded together, Christian and Muslim women together, to strike for peace. In the face of great danger, they showed greater courage.

"Armed only with white T-shirts and the courage of their convictions, they demanded a resolution to the country's civil war," says the website: www.praythedevilbacktohell.com. "Their actions were a critical element in bringing about a agreement during the stalled peace talks. A story of sacrifice, unity and transcendence, 'Pray the Devil Back to Hell' honors the strength and perseverance of the women of Liberia. Inspiring, uplifting, and most of all motivating, it is a compelling testimony of how grassroots activism can alter the history of nations."

When the women finally win their peace, their election, and their female president, I had chills running up and down my arms.

But questions remain. Taylor, who was forced into exile, is now being held for trial in the Hague. But what happened to the warlords? Do they still lurk, these evil bastards? And where? And who's watching them?

Think and Discuss: Should we American women have organized in the same way? Should we have printed up some t-shirts and sat in front of the White House day after day until Bush ended the war? Only one woman, Cindy Sheehan, had the courage to do this. Why didn't we all leave our comfortable lives and join her? Did we need the rape and hunger first? Could we have gotten rid of our own warlords, Bush and Cheney? Could we have prevented the disasters of the Bush Administration?

WEDNESDAY March 18, 2009 Comments by Joyce Marcel

2009-03-19T11:16:00.000-04:00

Before each showing, the Women's Film Festival runs an absolutely kicky and delightful one-minute trailer featuring Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's "I'm a Woman" (I don't know who is singing it) under a collage of shots taken from the various films. It's a wonderful piece of work, and I'm not sure who to credit it to. Anyone?

Last night, someone told me that she encourages people to read this blog because "Joyce always has strong opinions." I've thought about that, and I guess I feel that everyone has strong opinions. I may be more willing than most to express them, but this blog is not about what I think. It's about what everyone thinks who sees these films and is touched by them.

And if you were in the audience yesterday for "Pray the Devil Back to Hell," how could you be anything but moved? (More on this film tomorrow.)

I'm really just baiting you, the audience, the readers, with my "Think and Discuss" questions. I want to see if we can get a conversation going. Feel free to post comments. Tell me I'm arrogant. Tell me I'm a blithering idiot if you want, that I totally missed some important point or another. Don't leave me all alone out here. How can we see all these films about women and their voices without opening our own to scream, holler, praise and sing a little?

"THIS DUST OF WORDS" by Bill Rose.

This one almost pushed me off the rails.

It's billed as a "the biography of a writer and the town that sheltered her as mental illness closed in." The writer is Elizabeth Wiltsee, a girl with a brilliant mind - she taught herself to read and write Chinese and translated works into English from ancient Greek because she didn't trust translators - who disintegrated into homelessness and what the film calls "madness." She ultimately died what must have been a painful death - of starvation and with a broken leg - by the shores of the San Luis Reservoir in California. Her body wasn't found for days.

She supposedly had an IQ of 200. "This Dust of Words" was the title of her honors thesis at Stanford in 1969.

The "town that sheltered her" didn't really shelter her, and by then it was, anyway, far too late. She ended up sleeping on the steps of a church, and various church ladies left her food and clearly felt very good about themselves for doing so. The town tolerated her, although some admitted that Elizabeth challenged their Christian faith because they were so afraid of her that they ignored her on the street and in church.

Elizabeth was also cursed with a self-involved family full of pompous males who simply ignored her while she was going down the tubes. We meet one of her brothers, the one who is willing to talk to the camera (I believe there was another, who wouldn't). He's middle-class, comfortable and unimaginative, and he believes that he did everything he could for his sister because he occasionally sent her money.

Their father, he says, wonders every day why he didn't do more for her. Well, duh!

From Elizabeth's writings, we learn that she was too damned smart for her own good. She never felt comfortable in the world. She never felt that there was a place for her. She was beautiful, yet hated being called that. So something terrible must have happened to her along those lines, too.

In the end, she wanted only to be free - to sleep outdoors, to read in public libraries, to think. "All I want is to not be interrupted in my thoughts" she wrote when she was 23.

A woman of her period - she would be around my age if she had lived - would have been terribly conflicted about her role in society. She had been raised to be a wife and mother, yet was far more gifted than any of her siblings or fellow students. The world wasn't open to her yet, and it is no wonder that she went slightly, and then completely crazy.

The film left me wondering this - and I'll put it as a "Think and Discuss" question: If she had been a man, wouldn't she had found a place? Perhaps she would have found mentoring and guidance. Perhaps she would have won a Nobel Prize by now. How could a mind like this be allowed to be wasted?

TUESDAY March 17, 2009

2009-03-18T10:33:00.000-04:00

First Blog Post by Joyce Marcel

If you are a woman and you can't find yourself -- or at least some part of yourself, your deepest self -- reflected on one of the screens of the Women's Film Festival, then I don't really know what to say to you. I find myself in all of them.

And if you're a man, why wouldn't it be the same? Women's stories are above all human stories -- it's almost embarrassing to have to write those words, you'd think everyone would know that by now -- and these stories of extraordinary and quite ordinary women are lessons in being human.

A little housekeeping first. I was out of town this weekend, but I was told that the first showing of "Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm," was well attended Saturday evening, and that many men came (heh, heh) as well as women. The film tells a fascinating story, which I covered in my Brattleboro Reformer column "Getting a Buzz," which is posted on this site.

I'm introducing a new feature this year. It's called "Think and Discuss." The first topic is from "Passion and Power."

Discuss: Are there really two different female orgasms, a clitoral one and a vaginal one? Is there really a G spot, or was that idea invented to return heterosexual women to the penis, after they'd discovered vibrators and were spending a lot of money on batteries? Does the movie confuse the masturbatory with the intercoursal, if that's a word? After all, vibrators are great, but they aren't everything. Or are they?

20 SECONDS OF JOY

I still don't know what to make of the film "20 Seconds of Joy" by Jens Hoffman.

The film tells the story of Karina Hollekim, a stunning blue-eyed, pink-cheeked, superbly fit Norwegian blonde who enjoys throwing herself off (very) high cliffs and free-falling -- or flying, really -- until the very last minute before she has to open her parachute.

Every time she throws herself off another cliff I scream.

The sport is called BASE jumping (Building, Antenna, Span or Earth - the four categories of jumping).

Needless to say, the sport is extremely dangerous. And sponsored. Karina's clothing was covered with -- no great surprise here -- Red Bull logos.

Karina knows how dangerous it is.

"It's insane watching your your best buddies die," she says. "You have to ask yourself, is it worth it?"

And her father agrees. "There's a lot of statistics against her."

Yet when you watch her in her flight suit, soaring against the cliffs like a butterfly, it's breaktakingly beautiful. It lifts your spirits and elevates your comprehension of human capability. Isn't it all of our dreams -- and our nightmares -- to fly?

We can' even imagine the rush of adrenaline that shoots through her, the vistas she sees, the emotions she feels.

BASE jumping is Karina's joy, her passion and her obsession. Like jockeys and other thrill-seeking athletes, she's hooked on it. "If I don't do it, I'm not a complete person," she says. "I'm not a happy person."

Of course her friends are terrified for her safety. But Karina isn't concerned. She frankly says that the only thing that would stop her would be becoming a paraplegic or a mother. Odd choices, come to think of it.

But when she crashes into rock at 100 miles an hour and shatters both her legs, you're along for the ride because she's filming the jump.

The result? Twenty-one fractures in one leg. The doctor says she won't ever walk again. After myriad operations, she speaks from a wheelchair, and her biggest concern? "I can do everything right and it still can go wrong."

Then, subdued, she asks, "Is it really important to jump off a cliff for 20 seconds of joy?"

Think and discuss: Is Karina crazy, or does her obsession make sense to you? Or both?

THE POET'S VIEW: KAY RYAN: CHICKENS AND THE FUNNIES

This was just an absolute smashing film. By Mel Stuart, it's part of a wonderful series on the lives and work of both male and female poets. Kay Ryan was absolutely unknown to me -- she's the U.S. Poet Laureate for 2008-2009, which shows you how little I know about poetry -- so it was a special pleasure hearing her read, seeing her home and watching her work.

She write short poems with internal rhymes and wise thoughts that strike you in the heart as truths. In "Theft," for example, she compares the loss of the mind through diseases like Alzheimer's to a fox sucking out the insides of stolen eggs. The poem went by so fast -- my thanks to Stuart for showing us the words as Ryan reads, which makes it infinitely easier to comprehend -- that I can't quote it.

And oddly, since I'm writing this in the library, I can't find any of Ryan's poems on the shelves.

As a writer, though, Ryan's thoughts about work were especially interesting to me. And again, they struck as truths that I would have told myself, had I thought of them. For example, she said that she writes "from my desire to stop doing nothing." Exactly.

And, "A writer needs not seek suffering. Enough suffering will come to her."

And, she said, she writes in longhand on yellow legal pads because "you can't save mistakes in the computer." You never know whether, in an hour or so, something that you erased will be exactly what you need, while what you saved should be erased.

Think and Discuss: This comes from Ryan herself: "Is it worth it to be a poet?"

GETTING A BUZZ by Joyce Marcel

2009-03-18T10:24:00.000-04:00

How timely is it that the Women's Film Festival is showing "Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm," a 2007 film by Wendy Slick & Emiko Omorias?

Very timely. Vibrators have become big news here in Vermont.

On February 15, the Associated Press burned up the wires with a story that the Vermont Country Store's catalog, "The Voice of the Mountains" -- that repository for everything warm, fuzzy, sassafrassy, rural and old-timey -- is devoting a section to vibrators, creams, penis rings, DVDs and other sex aids.

The outrage was quick and vituperative. Many of the angry letters began with, "I'm not a prude, but..." It seems that people were shocked, shocked, to learn that sexual aids not only exist, but are sold on the open market.

Maybe they were also shocked, shocked, because these aids are being targeted to older folks? And who likes to think of old folks having sex? "Ew!," as the young ones say.

Or maybe they were grabbing at the last cultural taboo? Black people? Oh, one is president of the United States. Gay couples? Oh, Vermont led the way to acceptance with civil unions, and now they can marry in several states. What is left for people with the worst kind of closed minds, the kinds filled with conventional wisdom, to rant and rail against? Well, obviously, it's got to be sex.

And not just sex, but females enjoying sex. We're used to thinking about men enjoying sex -- we don't blink an eyelash anymore at those erectile disfunction commercials on television. It's the female orgasm that is so disturbing.

In the film, we learn some interesting things about the history of vibrators. We learn that in the shape of dildoes, they seem to have to have been known since early antiquity. That in Victorian times, women went to medical doctors for "treatments" that involved orgasms. The disease? It was called "hysteria," and a good treatment seemed to calm a woman down -- at least until the next appointment.

When vibrators -- and rural electrification -- became more easily available, porn movies began to feature women masturbating with them. That ended the doctor's visit for good -- it made vibrators unsavory.

But who needed a doctor for something you could do it in the privacy of your own home?

Then came the 1970s and the feminist movement. Artist and author Betty Dodson -- who is featured in the film -- almost single-handedly brought the vibrator back into women’s lives. She began a crusade to teach women how to have orgasms with vibrators – alone and with partners. Soon women were taking classes in "down there," In groups, they looked at their cervixes in mirrors. A battle raged over whether there actually was a vaginal orgasm, anyway, or if they weren't all clitoral. And if they were all clitoral, then who needed a man?

If I remember correctly, the "G Spot" was discovered around this time in order to even up the playing field once again.

Things calmed down until George W. Bush rallied the right-wing conservative Christians, who still believe that a woman should be barefoot, pregnant, tied to the kitchen and subservient to a man. For a while, things were (pardon) touch and go about whether even sex would survive.

Then, in 2004, former fifth grade teacher Joanne Webb was arrested for selling vibrators (in the South they have sex toy parties, like Tupperware parties) to two undercover cops in a small Texas town. "She had broken a state law that prohibits the sale of devices that stimulate the genitals," says the film's Web site. "Texas and three other states have enacted these laws as a backlash to feminism. In these states, however, it is legal to advertise and sell Viagra. This double standard for women has far-reaching contemporary implications for sexual freedom, civil liberties and the right to privacy."

As documentaries go, this is not a particularly good film. It features uncomfortable camera angles and cheesy historical reenactment. But as a part of women's history, it's riveting.

Getting back to the Vermont Country Store for a minute, owner Lyman Orton defended selling sex toys (it seems to have become a lucrative part of his business) by saying he was trying to defeat "the negative image of older folks held by younger ones and to demonstrate the tremendous mutual benefit to both groups of changing that outlook."

He was also looking for ways, he said, to move away "from the image of narrowing-down life as we age to one of expanding life."

Rip that page out of the catalog if you don’t care to look at it, Orton said.

And I'd add, let your assistant sell that birth control prescription if it goes against your religion. And if you don't like abortions, don't have one.

But, again, it’s not about sex. "It’s about more deeply understanding the changing culture around aging well through a conversation with those who know a thing or two about the subject," Orton said. "If, along the way, we bump into taboo subjects that make some uncomfortable, we will take them on in our characteristic no-nonsense, practical Vermont way."

Trailer for Who Does She Think She is

2009-03-13T04:15:00.001-04:00

For further information about the film and the five artists featured, go to Who Does She Think She Is.

MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE WOMEN by Joyce Marcel

2009-03-05T12:20:00.000-05:00

DUMMERSTON, Vt. - No woman is ordinary. We all have remarkable stories to tell. But some of us have extraordinary stories. Just wait until you see "20 Seconds of Joy" by Jens Hoffman.

The film is one of 27 being shown at this year's Women's Film Festival, now in its 18th year as a fundraiser for the Women's Crisis Center. The festival will run from from March 13 to March 22.

"20 Seconds" opens with Norwegian Karina Hollekim standing on top of a mountain and looking straight down into a fjord. She's making jokes about the importance of tucking her jacket into her pants. Just as you're wondering what she's talking about, she casually goes to the edge of the cliff and jumps off. (That's the part where I screamed.) She doesn't jump for suicide; she jumps for fun.

The sport is called BASE jumping (Building, Antenna, Span or Earth - the four categories of jumping). And the lovely Karina lives to free-fall and soar through the air. After she opens her chute, she lands with a face full of wide-eyed ecstasy.
Karina sometimes jumps from Alps and skis down. She jumps from towers and bridges. She jumps wearing a suit shaped like a butterfly, which gives her wings. She jumps in Switzerland, the U.S. and Mali.

And when she crashes into rock at 100 miles an hour and shatters both her legs, you're along for the ride because she's filming the jump.

"Yes I am scared, of course I am scared; I am human," she told an interviewer. "The difference is that I like it. I want to have that feeling.... You have to accept the fact that this might kill you. I think I have broken almost every bone in my body. I have lost a lot of friends along the way... But if pleasure is higher than the risk, then go for the jump."

Another remarkable woman on film is the painter Alice Neel. A brilliant portraitist, she spent decades painting in a room in her New York apartment - in obscurity, because abstract expressionists ruled the land. Only late in life did she receive the recognition and acclaim she deserved. The film was made by her grandson, Andrew Neel.

Neel was a free spirit, a bohemian, a piece of work, a terrible mother - both her sons (of different fathers) - tell stories about their abuse at her hands. But they also speak of their love for her.

As you watch Neel paint or see the paintings - often next to the people they represent - it's hard not to see every person as an Alice Neel painting. (If you don't believe me, check out aliceneel.com.) She might not have been mother of the year, or of the decade, and you might want to throttle her for her self-absorption and obsession with painting, but she knew what she wanted and she doggedly kept going, ultimately being recognized as one of the greatest painters of the 20th Century. She died in 1984.

Hawaiian politician Patsy Takemoto Mink (1927-2002) also left something precious behind - Title IX, the bill that opened athletics to women. Mink was a tiny, determined oriental woman - the first "woman of color" in the U.S. Congress - and a dogged fighter for progressive causes. In "Patsy Mink: Ahead of the majority," a 2008 documentary by Kim Bassford, we see her fighting the good fight, sometimes winning and sometimes losing, but always loving the battle.

And in "A Sense of Wonder," a 2008 film by Christopher Monger, the actress Kaiulani Lee performs a one-woman play she wrote about Rachel Carson at the end of her life. "Silent Spring" had been written, and Carson was enjoying the acclaim as well as the fight against the chemical companies. But she was also suffering with the cancer that soon will kill her. Shot at Carson's coastal home in Maine and using much of her own writing as dialog, you are made speechless by her detailed intelligence, her love of nature and her beautiful soul. I spent much of this film wishing that it was Carson herself speaking, that it was a documentary rather than a fiction, but it is enough that we have her words so beautifully portrayed.

There are other remarkable women to be met at the festival. There's a dreadfully arty and disorganized bio of the rocker Patti Smith, for example, which is, come to think of it, just as arty and disorganized as she is. But oh! When she sits down with a guitar, can she ever sing!

There are also films about the great injustices of the day - about rape as politics, about poverty, sweatshops and all the blood-boiling, outrageous rest. All manner of indignity is heaped upon women, and all manner of brave women fight against it.

There's even a film about the history of vibrators, but I'll get to that next week.

Surprise always rules at this festival. There are always films you've never heard of that stay with you for the rest of your life. Now is the time to meet remarkable women. Prepare to fall in love.

Joyce Marcel is a journalist whose first collection of columns, "A Thousand Words or Less," can be ordered from her website, joycemarcel.com. She can be reached at joycemarcel@yahoo.com.

Reprinted from the Brttleboro Reformer, March 4, 2009

2009 Women's Film Festival

2009-03-05T06:12:00.000-05:00

WHAT REMAINS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF SALLY MANN AVAILABLE SOON FOR PURCHASE OR RENTAL

2008-04-02T18:52:00.000-04:00

One of the finest films at this year's WFF will be available soon for
purchase or rental:

WHAT REMAINS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF SALLY MANN

As one of the world’s preeminent photographers, Sally Mann creates artwork that challenges viewers’ values and moral attitudes. Described by Time magazine as “America’s greatest photographer,” she first came to international prominence in 1992 with Immediate Family, a series of complex and enigmatic pictures of her three children. What Remains—Mann’s recent series on the myriad aspects of death and decay—is the subject of this eponymously titled documentary which contains unbridled access to the many stages of Mann’s work, and is a rare glimpse of an eloquent and brilliant artist.

View the trailer now:

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

2008-03-29T12:59:00.000-04:00

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)

2008-03-24T16:17:00.001-04:00

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.

*****************

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.

**************
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

2008-03-23T09:35:00.000-04:00

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

2008-03-21T16:46:00.000-04:00

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

2008-03-20T05:38:00.000-04:00

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.

*****************

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."

************************

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

2008-03-18T08:07:00.000-04:00

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.

*****************

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.

*****************

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

2008-03-17T18:25:00.000-04:00

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"

2008-03-15T14:23:00.000-04:00

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

2008-03-07T02:36:00.000-05:00

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.

Iron Ladies of Liberia--Opening the Film Festival on March 14 at the Hooker-Dunham Theater

2008-02-27T14:45:00.000-05:00

Friday, March 14 at 6:30pm Hooker-Dunham Theater
139 Main Street
Brattleboro, VT

IRON LADIES OF LIBERIA - 2007 Daniel Junge, Siatta Scott Johnson
77min Liberia/USA

Nearly everything in the country of Liberia was broken when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf took power as the first woman ever elected head of state in Africa. Faced with rebuilding her nation from zero, she turned to a remarkable team of women. See what women in charge looks like! Guest speaker, state senator, Jeanette White to be present.

Stay Tuned for Joyce Marcel's Film Festival Blog

2008-02-27T14:30:00.000-05:00

Brattleboro Reformer columnist, Joyce Marcel, will cover the Women's Film Festival and report back with news, gossip, and opinions. Catch it here or at the Brattleboro Reformer's website