There will be a religious war of independence, a sci-fi Japanese porn adventure, scenes from the lives of three lesbians and a woman who finds her identity intertwined with her love-hate relationship with salami.
And that's just for starters. This year's Women Make Waves (女性影展) film festival has more than 100 selections, with plot lines as diverse as the international cast of female directors.
For six years the festival has been coming to Taipei, getting stronger with each appearance. Stepping into the 7th year, the WMW 2000 will for the first time extend its scope outside of the Eslite Bookstore, where screenings used to take place. This year, women are making waves in Hsimenting (西門町). Six feature films will be screening at Spring Cinema Galaxy in Hsimenting, with the rest -- a combination of short films, documentary, experimental and animation films and videos -- showing at Eslite.
The number of films and videos is the first major change of the WMW 2000. There are 101 films and videos being shown over a 12-day period, triple the number of last year's festival and the five years prior to that. And there will also be six guest directors visiting Taipei during the event.
"We intend to present the festival as a yearly showcase for women's filmmaking around the world, just like a women's version of the Golden Horse International Film Festival," said Mia Chen (陳明秀), organizer for this year's festival.
WMW started with a video and visual arts exhibition seven years ago organized by the Awakening Foundation, a women's rights group. WMW has been generally considered as an issue-orientated event to promote women's rights awareness and to explore women's creativity. In past years, the WMW has focused on topics such as nationality, sex and sexuality and social issues.
"But we feel it is too much of a squander to use a whole film festival to talk about a few issues," Chen said. So this year, the selection is genre-based. "Let the films speak for themselves."
Oscar winning editor Gabriela Cristian (The Last Emperor) presents her first feature film -- Ladies Room -- as the premiere film for WMW 2000. In it, the conversation among four women in a Hollywood changing room reveals their innermost secrets, anger, fears, and dreams.
The characters include a Broadway veteran named Gemma, who meets her career rival, a rising starlet called Julia, in a dressing room and two women named Lucia and Lauren, a wife and her husband's mistress. With a cast that includes John Malkovich, it is a film full of humor and tension.
Another film that uses intimate conversation among women as its main vehicle is Atomic Sake, a submission from Canada. Montreal-based director Louise Archambaut explores the stalemate and confrontation of truth and lies by seeing how honest and revealing three best friends can be during confessions induced by Japanese Sake rice wine. A sharp black and white picture, it's intricately complex conversations and fluid camera work produce 30 minutes of dizziness for the audience.
One of the most controversial and incisive submissions for this year's WMW is Vera Chytilova's Traps, which ingeniously and humorously contrasts a woman's trauma of rape with a man's anxiety of castration. The result is a well-blended drama in which a veterinarian named Lenka, after being raped, decides to castrate the two men as revenge. But revenge does not bring her peace; predictably, it only casts more shadows over her life.
Once called "the First Lady of Czech New Wave" in the 60s, Chytilova (in her 70's) demonstrates her proficient narrative style by adding humor and irony to her beautiful cinematography, while still powerfully indicting society's abuse of women's bodies.
Local filmmaking is no doubt a major focus for each year's WMW. Representatives of local feature film are Huang Yu-san's (黃玉珊) Spring Cactus and Wang Shau-di's (王小棣) Yours and Mine. The former talks about a short but splendid life of a young prostitute, and the latter focuses on the neurosis of Taiwan society. Thanks to Taiwan's favorable public funding for documentary films in the past year, most of the local works are documentaries.
Last but not least are the programs on outstanding directors who are also special guests at WMW 2000. Shu Lea Cheang (鄭淑麗) holds a history degree at National Taiwan University, but she is one of the most active Taiwanese visual artists in New York and at many international film festivals. Describing herself as a "digital drifter," Cheang's creativity combines installation art, experimental films and multi media art on the Internet. Themes of her work often mingle race, sex, and sexuality. Cheang is presenting five of her short films this year as well as a new piece titled IKU, a Japanese sci-fi porn.
US senior film and documentary maker Barbara Hammer will also visit Taipei. The "godmother" of lesbian and female experimental films will present three documentaries and a feature film, including her 1998 work, the Female Closet, which talks about the sexuality secrets of three prominent female artists, and Tender Fiction, a tribute to Gertrude Stein.
The Women Make Waves festival starts Wednesday and runs through May 28. For details about venues and times, call 2395-1965 or 2327-8751 or go to www.wmw.com.tw
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