BRATTLEBORO — As the 22nd Annual Women's Film Festival hovers on the horizon, it's clear that the only thing better than having one independent film festivals in Brattleboro is having two independent film festivals in Brattleboro.
How else would film buffs be able to drench themselves in the brilliantly bright paintings of 15-year old Inocente, who has been homeless for most of her life?
Or meet Aneta Brodski, a deaf teenager who fearlessly and with unimaginable grace integrates deaf poetry with New York's slam poetry scene?
Or be able to hotly debate the courage of Houda al-Habash, who has been running a religious school for girls in Damascus for 30 years but whose ideas of women's liberation look nothing like ours?
Brattleboro has always had film festivals, but they have tended to be small ones. The Queen Bee has always been the Women's Film Festival, this year running from March 8 to March 17 at the New England Youth Theatre.
But as film buffs remember, the film selection arm of the festival split away last year after a political fight over the right to show films about women that may have been made by men. That committee morphed into the Brattleboro Film Festival, which had a very successful first run in November.
Film lovers waited with bated breath to see what would happen next. And now we know.
The 22nd Women's Film Festival, which continues to serve as a fundraiser for the Women's Freedom Center, is bringing us 26 films made by women and featuring a woman's point of view.
“We felt it important that there be a women's film festival,” said Vickie Sterling, the co-director of the center and a member of the film selection committee. “We wanted films that were women's stories and women's truths. So now we have two great film festivals in town, and we're excited about looking forward.”
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Why do we need a “women's” film festival this late in the day?
The sad truth is that from a woman's perspective, 21st-century Hollywood still falls way too short. Only 16 percent of major studio films are made with women in mind, and even some of the most important female directors still make macho-dominated warmonger movies. (Yes, I'm talking to you, Kathryn Bigelow.)
While television is full of fascinating female characters written by fascinating female writers (and yes, I'm talking to you, Shonda Rhimes and Lena Dunham), with few exceptions film remains mostly franchise blow-'em-ups and comedies that denigrate women and are funny mainly to teenage boys.
Since women make up slightly more than half of the world, you would think this is a strategy for planned obsolescence.
But thanks to the international market, these film dinosaurs will never die. Nothing short of a giant meteor - or a worldwide recognition of women's rights - will stop their proliferation.
That is why independent films offer the best chance to learn about women's lives and hear women's viewpoints.
“This is an opportunity to see films we don't get to see,” Sterling said. “And this is a festival for everyone - men and women. We want everyone to come out and see these films. We hope in some part we can counterbalance the culture and media, which is so male dominated. As they said in the film we ran last year, Miss Representation, “You can't be what you can't see.”
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The festival opens with a gala on Friday, March 8, featuring a film from last year, Girls in the Band, Judy Chaikin's documentary about talented but under-recognized female jazz players. At a reception beforehand - with champagne, hors d'oeuvres, and live jazz - dress will be “cocktail attire,” although what that might mean in Vermont is left to the imagination.
Young women star in many of the films.
There's Inocente, in Andrea Nix Fine's documentary Inocente, whose brilliant use of color and paint is almost blindly happy, while her homeless life is so very sad. As she moves around San Diego - she's lived, at one point or another, at every homeless shelter there - she puts imaginative makeup on her face and flowers in her hair. Her first one-woman show sells out.
The film just won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.
“It's a beautiful film about this young woman's spirit,” Sterling said. “She's 15, been homeless, and has experienced so much tragedy in her young life. So you would expect that her art might be dark. But it's vibrant and bright and beautiful and optimistic. It's a very uplifting film. It shows what's possible and how we sometimes judge things on the surface. Stories are much more complicated than we can know.”
And there's Aneta Brodski, the focus of Judy Lieff's documentary Deaf Jam, who will light up your world.
An Israeli-American high school student at the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York, Brodski dances her American Sign Language poetry. After she enters a speaking poetry slam, she meets a young, speaking, Palestinian poet, and they collaborate on a powerful, passionate poem that encompasses speaking, deafness, Middle East politics, and navigating the adult world. Brodski has tons of star power and is endlessly interesting to watch.
“The energy in this film was amazing,” Sterling said. “It transcended ASL poetry.”
Even in the smaller category of narrative films, young women star. In Mosquita y Mari, by Aurora Guerrero, two young Mexican-American actresses play high school students who form a friendship that leads to a tentative and unexpected kind of love.
Oddly enough, some films don't reflect the views of the Freedom Center.
Take, for example, The Light in Her Eyes, by Julia Meltzer and Laura Nix, the 87-minute documentary about a conservative Syrian female Muslim preacher. (The film was made in 2011, before the fighting in Syria began; what the present or the future holds for the young girls and women shown in this film is unknown.)
At the time of the filming, in 2010, al-Habash had been running her summer Qur'an school for 30 years, while living in a culture where more conservative clerics preach that women should stay at home and not be able to read or study or work. In 1983, al-Habash had 50 students. In 2010, she had about 1,000.
It's fascinating to see Syria as it was in normal times - to visit homes and see the home furnishings, to drive through the streets, to shop in malls, to see the mix of religious and secular people in the street, and to meet men and women who are going about their daily lives.
What's disturbing is al-Habash's preaching to innocent girls that they should get educated and work, but that their first responsibility will always be to their husbands and their families. That a woman is a spinster, a failed woman, by the time she is 20 years old. That a woman cannot work if her husband can provide for her needs. That women should always wear the hijab to cover their heads and necks.
“The hijab is an obligation to protect women from inappropriate looks and attention and to protect a woman's beauty and purity for her husband later on,” al-Habash teaches these young girls, as if teaching men to stop attacking women wasn't the better solution.
Then, later on, she tells them, “A woman in Islam is honored, praised, free, and valuable.”
Talk about mixed messages.
“The Light in Her Eyes is a challenging film to watch,” said Sterling. “You have moments when you think, 'Well, here's a woman with strong viewpoints who has done quite a bit in forwarding women's rights in some ways. She feels it's important that women work and know the Qur'an. But she thinks she'll be judged first by how she treated her husband and family.'”
“The viewpoints are different from ours,” Sterling continued. “But that's part of the festival - accepting and learning that there are women who believe they're liberated, and asking if because their form of liberation doesn't look like ours, is it real? It's a film that makes you think about our beliefs and what liberation looks like.”
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There is much to discover in this festival - for example, there's a flawed but fascinating documentary about women war correspondents in World War II, and another about a brilliant cancer researcher who discovers, at the age of 42, that she is dying of breast cancer.
In light of the fact that the U.S. military is now allowing women on the front lines, the festival is showing Beth Freeman's documentary Sisters in Arms, a study of four Canadian military women who served in Afghanistan.
Canada has allowed women on the front lines since 1989, but only 2 percent of combat troops are female. Still, when the filmmakers ask an officer how many women are fighting, he says, “We stopped counting a long time ago. A soldier is a soldier.”
We first meet the women at home with their husbands, their children, their parents, and their families. The parents are naturally hard hit by the decision of their daughters to go to war - where they cannot protect them.
One says, “I'm naturally horrified by the brutality of conflict... some of my own pacifistic stands have been challenged and I've had to rethink them. I don't know if it's a good idea that we're there. I just know it would be a very bad idea to leave.
“Is it worth the risk to have our own daughter there? No, if something happens to her. And that makes me a hypocrite.”
Visually, the film is dreary but then, so is Afghanistan. We see the four women at their various jobs - fascinating for those of us who don't have a distinct picture of daily life in a war zone - and then back home after their deployment, where they all say it was the best experience of their lives.
Either Canadian men are more civilized than American men or the filmmakers wanted to avoid the most glaring truth about women in the military, because we know that in the U.S. military, a large percentage of the women serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at home are sexually harassed and/or raped. In the film, the issue is not mentioned once.
More information about the festival can be found on the Women's Freedom Center site.