The annual Women Make Waves Film/Video Festival (
This year, the festival will have a strong French atmosphere, featuring revered French director Agnes Varda's 12 films that span from the 1950s to this year.
The festival will showcase 50 other films, presented under categories of different women's issues such as women's bodies, sexual adventurism, cultural identities, motherhood and women's life histories. Short fiction films and documentaries make up the backbone of this year's smaller-scale Women Make Waves, with most films by local women filmmakers.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF WOMEN MAKE WAVES FILM/VIDEO FESTIVAL
The festival will move to Kaohsiung and Taichung in October.
The poster for Women Make Waves 2001 shows a young girl peering at a small screen on to which is projected an image of the 73-year-old Varda holding a digital camera shooting scenes. The poster says "Marching forward, following the New Wave of Grandma," a direct tribute to the French director who was a pioneer in French New Wave filmmaking of the 1960s.
Varda, who always appears in her 1960s-style, rounded, bouffant hair, is known for her unique perspective and narratives, and also her prolific creativity. She began her career as a photographer and then, with virtually no knowledge of filmmaking, she wrote and directed La Pointe Courte (1954), a low-budget feature that contrasted a young couple's marital problems with the struggles of fishermen and their families in a Mediterranean village. The film's narrative structure was a precursor to stylistic devices later used by France's New Wave directors, including Francois Truffaut, Jean-luc Godard and other directors involved in the influential magazine Les Cahiers du Cinema.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF WOMEN MAKE WAVES FILM/VIDEO FESTIVAL
Varda's second feature film Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962) pushed her into the spotlight of the major European film festivals, Cannes and Venice. Cleo is a beautiful singer awaiting a cancer diagnosis. During the two hours of waiting, between 5pm and 7pm, she anxiously wanders the streets of Paris and meeting with friends, family and lovers, until she has a long talk with a soldier on his way to fight in the Algerian War.
Vagabond (1985), one of her best films, is a powerful, almost documentary look at events leading to the death of a young drifter. Through flashbacks and brief interviews, we trace the girl's final weeks, as she camps alone or falls in with various men and women, many of whom project their needs onto her or try to give her life direction. She squats an old house, smoking hash with a man, falls for a Tunisian laborer and works beside him pruning grape vines, stays with a couple shepherding goats, meets an agronomist trying to save plane trees, gets tipsy with an old woman, and has an offer to appear in porn films.
The film won Varda a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, a Fipresci International Critics award, and best foreign-language film by the Los Angeles Film Critics Circle, among other numerous awards.
Apart the focus on Agnes Varda, the festival will also screen the outstanding feminist historical documentary Paris Was A Woman (1995), by American filmmaker Greta Schiller. The film traces an American female expatriate in Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, using home movies, old photos and interviews. The Paris of the 1920s was a permissive environment to explore art and lives and many of the women were lesbians, including writer and poet Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas.
The film also portrays many more female artists, writers, photographers, designers, and adventurers who may not be household names in the US but were well-known at the time, in Paris. It also unveils the relationship between Stein and Picasso, and between Sylvia Beach and James Joyce.
For those eager for kinky subject matter, German writer and filmmaker Monika Treut's Gendernauts should rank high on the to see list. A documentary about San Francisco's transgender, cross-gender, non-gender community, the movie features a kaleidoscope of gender identities that is sure to have audience members twitching their fingers to indicate quotation marks as they discuss the identities of the film's men and women. In the movie, everyone from an army veteran, a video artist, a Penthouse model and nightclub performer, a porn star, musicians, and writers are portrayed sympathetically.
Treut gained acclaim with her film Virgin Machine (1988), which was a focused look at variant sex preferences, sex workers and sexual minorities. The film is also direct and bold in its handling of sexual thematic material. Gendernauts offers a more gentle, human look at her characters.
There are also films about personal journeys and women's self-exploration, such as Vietnamese-American filmmaker Trinh Minh Ha (
What: Women Make Waves Film/Video Festival 2001
When: Sept. 14 to Sept. 21
Where: Spring Cinema, 4F, 59 Chunghua Rd., Sec. 1 (中華路一段59號4樓), Hsimen MRT Station
Tickets: Available through Acer ticket outlets and at http://ticket.acer121.com, or call (02)2784-1111. Tickets can also be obtained at Spring Cinema, tel: (02)2388-5576. For detailed screening schedules, check http://www.wmw.com.tw
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