Bad, wicked and horny. This is how viewers are encouraged to feel at this year’s Women Make Waves Film Festival (女性影展, WMW), which runs through Oct. 26 and features a lineup of nearly 80 feature, documentary, short and animated films from 22 countries.
Festival director Pecha Lo (羅珮嘉) says WMW has evolved considerably, and it’s now time for it to seek liberation.
“In our early days, we showed men loving men and women loving women. Then we talked about transgender issues. Now that we don’t have questions and doubts about who we are, we want to start to queer it up,” Lo told the Taipei Times.
Photos Courtesy of WMW
The work of Marit Ostberg, for example, explores queer politics through pornography. Currently based in Berlin, the Swiss filmmaker is internationally known for a series of queer feminist pornographic films. In her 2011 documentary Sisterhood, the lesbian porn director talks to participants in one of her porns about sexual power and pleasure as well as their experiences of taking part in the queer feminist porn scene in Europe.
“Watching the film, local audiences can get an idea of how situations vary in different countries. While some countries remain homophobic, others are open to different sexual orientations and gender identities. In Berlin, they have already looked into feminist porn as an industry,” Lo says.
Tomorrow night, Ostberg will attend the screenings of Sisterhood and two of her pornographic works, Authority and Share, and discuss her works.
Photos Courtesy of WMW
SHARE THE NEGATIVITY
Those fed up with the tenets of positive thinking are invited to confront, accept and share their negative feelings with others. In The Alphabet of Feeling Bad, an experimental short by German artist Karin Michalski, American queer-feminist theorist and activist Ann Cvetkovich performs in a bed in accordance with her conversation with the filmmaker and defines negative feelings such as trauma and depression in alphabetic order, with the intension of politicizing them in the context of homophobia, racism and neoliberal capitalism.
Startlingly autobiographical and psychologically complex, Abuse of Weakness, the festival’s opening film, features Isabelle Huppert as director Catherine Breillat’s onscreen equivalent to explore the abusive, sado-masochistic relationship between a partly crippled film director and an unrepentant con man reportedly played by rapper Kool Shen.
Photos Courtesy of WMW
Breillat aficionados might want to take note that the French auteur will hold a talk after the screening of her film tonight.
Apart from the matter of sex, gender and queer politics, the festival organizers also attempt to address current social issues through cinematic works. In light of recent controversies surrounding the legislation of same-sex marriage, films in the section The Faces of Making a Family are intended to challenge the conventional idea about family. Jackie, for example, shows that the bond that links a family is not necessarily one of blood through a road trip taken by two twin sisters, who are raised by their two fathers, to see their surrogate mother whom they never meet.
With the sense of authenticity of a docudrama, Berlin- and Sundance-winning 52 Tuesdays weaves together an emotionally charged story about a teenage girl’s struggle to adjust her mother’s female-to-male gender transition.
Photos Courtesy of WMW
“The anti-gay marriage protest last year prompted us to return to the basic question: what is a family? It doesn’t just concern gays and lesbians. For example, straight people and asexual individuals may also want to form families not with a husband or a wife but with friends. And they need the kinds of legal guarantees that are found within the traditional institution of marriage,” Lo says.
Photos Courtesy of WMW
Photos Courtesy of WMW
Photos Courtesy of WMW
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