Get ready for the provocative at women's film festival

There will be several dominatrices, both on-screen and off. There will be a German woman exploring a sexual adventure in San Francisco with lesbians, trans-sexuals and sexperts. There will erotic liberation in a Japanese senior women's apartment when they capture an aging Romeo in their apartment. Back in Taipei, a diva from a red envelope cabaret develops an obsession feeding stray dogs.

New, bizarre, erotic challenges, this is what should be expected from the 55 films of the upcoming Women Make Waves Film and Video Festival (女性影展, WMW). Entering its ninth year, the festival continues to present the work of women filmmakers from Taiwan and abroad over the past year.

Having established itself as a small and unconventional film festival, this year WMW prepares a more celebrity-studded menu for movie fans, with more than 10 international guests, including two renowned directors, Monika Treut from Germany and Hamano Sachi from Japan, who bring their latest works to be shown in a dual festival opening. There will also be an international forum inviting film producers from Korea, France, UK and Canada to discuss women's role in filmmaking.

"This year we have many films that can be quite provocative, that boldly and directly confront taboos and conventions," said Jane Yu (游惠貞), organizer of this year's WMW.

For Yu -- in fact for many movie fans, gender studies teachers and students in Taiwan -- the time to feature Monika Treut and her seven films is long overdue. Golden Horse Festival fans may remember lining up for tickets to her Virgin Machine (1988), about a German woman's sexual adventure in San Francisco, Female Misbehavior (1992), documenting several women's bad sexual habits and Didn't Do it for Love, a documentary about the colorful life of Eva Norvind, the Marilyn Monroe of Mexican "B" movies.

Having began filmmaking in 1985, Treut's seven films always raise the eyebrows of her audience, for they poignantly challenging gender and sexuality in daring but humorous ways. Treut is probably not the first to portray lesbian sex, sado-masochism and trans-sexuality in her films. But she may be the first to portray such topics with a sense of liberation, raising more questions about gender and sexuality. No wonder her films are always fervently chased by film festivals and feminist scholars, but denounced by religious circles.

Treut's new work, Warrior of Light, selected by this year's Berlin Film Festival, has a slightly soften tone from her previous work. It documents Brazilian Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, award-winning artist and human-rights activist who denounced her aristocratic background and began mingling with street children in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, saving them from gun fights, abandonment and AIDS. It will be the first opening film of this year's WMW.

The other opening film is Lily Festival, by Japanese filmmaker Hamano Sachi, who gained fame in Japan as a pioneering female porn director with more than 300 films since the mid-1970s. Sachi insisted on bringing a women's perspective to the world of porn films, making her a distinguished figure in Japan. Lily Festival is about a group of aging women who live together and the antics that ensue when a 75-year-old Don Juan shows up at their doorstep.

Korean/Australian filmmaker Melissa Lee brings three films to Taipei, including the award-winning Soshin: In Your Dreams. In the film Lee returns to Korea in search of the old dreams of her parents' generation, who confronted both political unrest and the restrictions of a disciplinarian society.