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.
By Deepa Mehta (India, 1998)
105min
A loving Indian family with an eight-year-old daughter gets caught up in an ethnic and religious war for independence. In one night, everything is thrown into chaos. Chosen as the Indian Oscars entry for the best foreign film for 1999, Earth is the most moving film from the Three Elements set -- Fire, Earth, and Water.
"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.
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