The following pieces are reviews and others tidbits about the films I saw during the 15th IAWRT (The International Association of Women in Radio & Television) Asian Women’s Film Festival, held from 5th – 7th March, 2019 in New Delhi. The following are the reviews of the films I saw on the last (third) day.
It is a beautiful festival, if small, showcasing films from women filmmakers across the world.
I have tried to remain as detailed and factually correct about the films I managed to see – as much as my limited memory allows nearly after a week of the screening. I have tried to include details and related links of the films wherever possible. Plot summaries, character names etc have been taken from various internet sources. Mild spoilers are inevitable in the way I wish to talk about these films.
Section | Enquiry
Muteum | Ägee Pak-Yee | Estonia | 5 min | Animation
A school field trip to the Art Museum results in imaginations going wild. The identical looking children (who magically transform into identical symmetrical shapes) follow the teacher who guides them through the greatest hits of art history of the humans – everything from The Creation of Adam to Matisse’s dance – all rendered in a hand drawn style consistent with whimsical universe of Muteum.
The teacher (like a lot of our own schooling), asks them to watch but remain quiet, imbibe but not discuss. She hushes them at the slightest sound. But there is something wrong in our approach to teaching, if one isn’t supposed to react (and naturally discuss) to Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. There is an evident difference in the manner in which our artistic ancestors treated nudity and sexuality, and the way we treat it now, as reflected through the arts.
When the teacher goes to a loo break, all hell breaks loose, and the children transform and enter the paintings. What follows is brilliant, madcap montage of the students reinterpreting and transforming those paintings with their own understanding of the world. Muteum, through its intelligent premise, full of energy and insight, also tells us about the limited understanding of the world we feed into our own children, and how art then acts as a breaker of these chains. I came out of the screening humming the tune and re-enacting the teacher’s sush.
Section | Framed
Did You Know? | Lynn Kim | USA | 8 min | Animation
‘An exploration in shared sights of queerness and sexuality between the spotted hyena and myself’, says the author.
‘Did You Know’ starts with facts about the biological, sexual and social nature of hyenas, with hand-drawn, minimally animated illustrations. It is hard to determine a the gender of a hyena due to its similar genitalia between male female, it says. The film is then accompanied by inter titles about the author drawing her own parallels with a hyena’s social and sexual disposition. The text appears slowly, like scratches, before fully forming on the screen, much like the aforementioned identity.
One tries to read the scratches and guess what the author might be saying, till the text becomes clear in itself. By taking the metaphor of the hyena, and breaking it down and assimilating it with the authors own narrative and style, Did You Know gives a sense of completeness – it gives a clear picture of a small, indiscreet but significant part of someone’s life.
Traditional Bazaar | Hyoju Nam | South Korea | 3 min | Experimental
Traditional Bazaar is simple in how it looks. It works well as a portrait of a bazaar (market). The camera remains still throughout- now only the participants are moving. Freed of movement, particulars and facts about the market, it invites us to take time and view those who inhabit and visit the market. The film renders subjects in selective colours, pausing on frames where one can observe the people walking around, and then moving on to observe another frame some undeterminable length of minutes later. This is a beautiful, engaging way of observing the bazaar, like revisiting a memory of an act trainspotting or birdwatching.
Falaknaz | Sahar Salahshoor | Iran | 59 min | Non-fiction
What a weirdly fun and full-of-life portrait this is. There’s a certain affection and admiration the audience has for the elderly that are confident in the world they inhabit; I have highlighted this before too, and it appears as a common thread across many films across IAWRT – Nino Orjonikidze’s Altzaney, Iris Ben Moshe’s Broken Pipe, and Rishaya’s Roshan and Mani. Reiterating myself, I think all of us desire a sense of self-respect, self-control and independence that we wish remains alive in us till the very end of our lives; we wish to be active protagonists of our lives, if they could be condensed to films. It doesn’t matter what quirks or situations are presented, as long as we remain the writers.
The film documents the life of its titular character, an Iranian woman living with her two daughters in a small rural village in western Iran. The film spans roughly a period of 6 months of the filmmaker’s stay with the family. But Falaknaz is no ordinary woman. For one she is tall and muscular, with manly features and a deep manly voice, she iterates herself. She has 2 daughters to raise by herself, a shop to run, and she has to scrape the shrubs with a rake and arrange them on the roof by herself. She is also fascinated and involved in the local election, just like local idle men.
There is a workmanlike quality to her approach to her life, and she remains quite self-aware about it. When the light goes out, she is worried about what might happen to the ice-cream in the refrigerator, she tells the filmmaker. ‘Why is anyone interested in me?’ asks Falaknaz to the camera passingly – she can’t be bothered too much with the filmmaker now. She can’t worry about why the filmmaker wants to film her, she has her own worries to care about. (Life wasn’t supposed to so physically hard on me, but that’s how it turned out to be – she says).
But it is also why Falaknaz feels so real and so satisfying as a film; it is a life almost unaffected by the presence of the camera – and precisely why it makes such a lively portrait of a person – I was easily reminded of the brief moments of fun of senile elders I have come across when they are in their element. Falaknaz is always in her element. When you talk about a lion, a lion is a lion, it doesn’t matter if it’s male or female, say the idling men of town, referring to Falaknaz. Falaknaz has crossed traditional gender boundaries of her society, and has become a bigger entity, both by natural build and social disposition.
Now incharge of lives of her daughters and herself, she has entered the spaces reserved generally for men in her town; she goes on rambling about the need for campaigning for a candidate because he has bothered to give a speech in her town despite hating all the candidates. All politicians are alike, and all elections are useless, she says out loud too – but it is a wilful exercise we all engage in for our own entertainment and meaning making. ‘I will vote for anyone I like’, says Falaknaz, digressing with a man trying to convince her to vote for a particular candidate, even when it is her own preferred candidate.
Some of the most precious of the moments in the film come when the filmmaker just observes Falaknaz watching TV. She watches TV and comments on it, as if directly scolding the commentator. ‘Iran sucks’, she says while watching the football team play; she gets pissed off at the news anchor for not showing the election results of her town quickly. When the elections are announced, and their candidate has won, she is satisfied – she can now go back to work, like her daily routine (She would have returned to her routine with similar enthusiasm even if he had he lost, I suppose). Life sometimes fairly rewards you for the efforts you have put in.
The filmmaker returns to Falaknaz after 3 years. The house has changed – there is a lot of new stuff now – things have progressed. One of the daughters is married; the other owns a car and is studying in the university. ‘I have given them the freedom to marry’ says an older Falaknaz. She has served competently as a parent; but she has grown older, and it is harder for her to stay in the shop now. In the closing scene, Falaknaz is in the farm with the sheep. She talks to the filmmaker, and tells her now she needs to go back to herding. The camera finally stays back and observes her in routine from a distance; here’s a portrait of a person who has written her own film, enabled by a perceptive filmmaker.
hungryrj 