Different points of view
BHAWANI CHEERATH
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EVENT `Made by Women 2,' an International Women's Film Festival, will travel to eight cities in India.
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Women and cinema: A scene from `Sancharam.'
It was a `lesser known half' of cinema that was screened at the `Made by Women 2,' an International Women's Film Festival held in Thiruvananthapuram recently. Sourced from 10 countries, the documentaries, short films, animation and feature films by women filmmakers, who had received international recognition, brought into focus elements of the traditional and the personal, issues of development, the problems of the nowhere people, migration and the status of women.
In Thiruvananthapuram, the festival was organised by Point of View and Film Lovers' Cultural Association (Filca). Point of View is a Mumbai-based association of women, which aims "to promote the points of view of women through a sustained and creative use of media" that would ultimately facilitate the mainstreaming of the concerns of women, explained Aditi Mittal, coordinator of the organisation. This year the festival took off from Thiruvananthapuram and will travel to eight cities before the curtains come down on the festival in Mumbai.
Pioneering women
In keeping with their aim to bring to light the contributions of pioneering women in cinema, the highlight of the festival was the screening of `Harlequin' by Lotte Reiniger who made the first silhouette-animation film in 1926. Few of her 70 films are available in original, as she could not carry the negatives along when she fled Germany in the 1930s. Many of her films were interpretations of classic fairy tales, which she explained thus, "I love working for children, because they are a very critical and very thankful public."
The sheer range of issues handled by these women tells us that these filmmakers responded to problems as a person and their choice of theme was not necessarily coloured by their gender. This was evident in `Underground Orchestra' by the Peru-born, Dutch citizen, Heddy Honigman, who trains the camera on the musicians of the Paris underground who eke out a living playing their music. But then films like `Purity' by Anat Zuria (Israel), `The day I became a woman' by Marziyeh Meshkini (Iran), `My Body' by Margaret Olin (Norway) and `Sancharam' by Ligy Pullapally (India), where the woman was the axis, were points of view often left untouched by the mainstream filmmakers.
Experimentation
That the women did not fear the use of technique or experimentation was evident in the `claymation' (clay-animation) used by Joan Gratz (the United States) in `The Dowager's Feast' and `Mona Lisa descending a Staircase' or Jayne Parker's `Whirlpool,' where music and underwater choreography create a visual spectacle. What purpose do such screenings serve, is a question often asked. The appropriate response can be located in Marziyeh Meshkini's remark regarding her debut film, `The day I became a Woman,' "I believe we should help women gain equal rights through cultural activities."
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