Film and Video

Faces of a Fig Tree (Ichijiku No Kao)

Directed by Kaori Momoi

Saturday, March 15 7:30 pm

This year’s festival is subtitled Past/Present and is particularly interested in looking at the ways in which women filmmakers reveal how the past has shaped the present. Would you say today’s challenges and obstacles for women filmmakers have changed? And how do you think the situation in your country is in particular when compared to other countries?

I often joke that “ A Japanese man prefers a woman he can take down” but in Japan, which has a long history of chauvinism, women–let alone women filmmakers–still have a difficult time in the work place. As proof of that, there is not one female director in the Japanese major movie industry. I feel that now and from now on, with a rooted coed system (where men experience being bested academically by women), young men find it easier to work with and share a respectful relationship with women. As an actress I wrote scripts on set and participated creatively as an actor thinking to become a filmmaker. The time for female filmmakers has only really just begun. I can assure you that from here on out there will be a deluge of women artists.

Why are you a filmmaker and how does working with film help you tell your story?

I think there is a certain something that films express better than other arts such as literature or music. It’s something subconscious or intuitive that a living being gives birth to. This instantaneous feeling that emerges from my body keeps me making films.

The world in which the Kadowaki family lives seems at the border of reality and fiction. Their environment appears dominated by fantasy while all the characters are going through intense transformation. What kind of aesthetic and style did you use to enhance this sort of surrealism?

To die, like a television switching off, suddenly causes the picture of daily life to disappear. Consequently, to live, means partaking in daily living. Daily life doesn’t contain a lot of big surprises; if we don’t look at it through our memories or other people’s eyes, it doesn’t hit home that we’re actually happy. The themes in this film are Why can’t we feel the happiness we have now’ and isn’t it a let-down not to be able to?” I wanted to show people that calmly eating around the dinner table, if you stop to look at it, is beautiful.

You are well known as an established actress. With Faces of a Fig Tree you directed a film yourself for the first time. Did the experience of directing change your view of acting?

Actors are an entity that neither transform nor perform. I found that I wanted them to lend their talents and become creators on set.

Could you choose your favorite scene in your film or an anecdote related to it and tell us what you particularly like about it?

During filming, I never explained to the actors what scene we were shooting. I wrote the script, but the majority of the time the actors spoke in the scene as a response to my lines and instructions. Then it was a matter of arriving back at the lines from the script.

I like the dining table where the family is eating croquettes after the father has died. The children knew that they were eating at the table after their father’s death, but with the mother’s line “ Your father sure is late tonight” it seems as though they become completely unsure of whether he is even dead anymore and they just continue eating silently. I think of them as children clumsily trying to support their mother, who’s grown a little bit funny in the head after the death of her husband, through the mundane daily routine of eating. That’s my favorite scene.

Translated from Japanese by Robert Behnen, edited by C. Marran

The Mirroring Cure

Directed by Charlotte Ginsborg

2007, UK, video, 28 minutes

Saturday, March 8, 2:00 pm

Women With Vision is proud to announce that Charlotte Ginsborg is flying in Minneapolis from London this Friday to introduce her film The Mirroring Cure presented March 8 on International Women’s Day. Part of the Short Films, Program One, The Mirroring Cure is a genre mix of documentary and fiction which tries to understand how the employees of a company are affected by the demolishing of an old building and the construction of its replacement.

Operation Filmmaker

Directed by Nina Davenport

Thursday, March 20, 7:00 pm

This year’s festival is subtitled Past/Present and is particularly interested in looking at the ways in which women filmmakers reveal how the past has shaped the present. Would you say today’s challenges and obstacles for women filmmakers have changed? And how do you think the situation in your country is in particular when compared to other countries?

I hesitate to be so blunt, but I do think film is still an extremely sexist industry. Just look at the statistics published each year by the fabulous Guerrilla Girls. They have fantastic billboards, such as one proclaiming, “Even the U.S. Senate is more progressive than Hollywood: Female Senators: 14%, Female Film Directors: 4%” and “The Anatomically Correct Oscar: He’s white & male, just like the guys how win!” Fortunately, things are much better for female documentary filmmakers, probably because the industry is less hierarchical. We don’t need anyone’s go-ahead to start making a film. But even then, you see a kind of sexism in the sensibilities of the festival programmers, a major factor in determining which films succeed and which fail, and also with audiences. And the majority of well-known documentary filmmakers are male.

Why are you a filmmaker and how does working with film help you tell your story?

I actually began my career as an artist in still photography, specifically black & white street and portrait photography, inspired by photographers such as Diane Arbus and Bruce Davidson. In the photographs I admired most, you could feel the connection between the subject and the photographer and I think that had an enormous affect on my filmmaking. I have been a subject to greater or lesser extents in all my films because I am interested in how people respond to being photographed. I’m also interested in my relationship to the people I film. Needless to say, Operation Filmmaker takes the subject/photographer relationship to an extreme.

Was the production of this film a learning experience for you in terms of documentary ethics and narrative as well as film production?

My film is in fact all about documentary ethics. The conflict that often occurs between a documentary filmmaker and his or her subject is normally kept out of the film, but since I’m an American and had control over the film and Muthana is Iraqi and felt powerless to control the film – and sometimes felt invaded by it – there was an obvious parallel to the American invasion of Iraq. This seemed the perfect set-up to examine an issue that lurks behind the scenes of many documentaries – that they are often made by people with resources about people without resources – which always poses a real moral quandary.

You have a very interesting way of blending the reality and the fiction of war. How do you think the representations of war and its portrayal in the media in particular affect the sense people make of war?

I think the way we sanitize the war in the news makes people more complacent than they would be if, like Al Jazeera, we showed images of dead bodies – or if we let scenes organically unfold and play out, the way they do in documentary, rather than reducing everything to superficial sound bites. I think today’s news media in the U.S. is of appallingly poor quality, it is actually much better in Europe.

Could you choose your favorite scene in your film or an anecdote related to it and tell us what you particularly like about it?

One of my favorite scenes is when Muthana is angry that I tried to set parameters on the idea of getting him a visa to the U.S. and he is so fed up with me, his life, and the documentary, he yells at me, “Fuck you! Fuck Kouross! And fuck David Schisgall!” I just love the idea of the documentary film subject totally rebelling and telling the filmmakers off. At the moment it occurred, I was extremely upset that I was trying to help him and his only response was to be angry, but when I watched the footage later, I found it hilarious. I also love all the scenes from DOOM and how uncanny and surreal it was that Muthana ended up on a multi-million dollar film set that was all about creating an atmosphere of war when he was trying to escape war. Not to mention, all one had to do to see war was turn on the nightly news. But by the time you’ve edited 400 hours down to an hour and a half, you pretty much love every scene that’s managed to successfully avoid the fate of ending up on the cutting room floor.

It Happened Just Before (Kurz davor ist es passiert)

Directed by Anja Salomonowitz

Sunday, March 16, 2:00 pm

This year’s festival is subtitled Past/Present and is particularly interested in looking at the ways in which women filmmakers reveal how the past has shaped the present. Would you say today’s challenges and obstacles for women filmmakers have changed? And how do you think the situation in your country is in particular when compared to other countries?

I think the situation for woman filmmakers in general is difficult: to be accepted by a man’s world. Here in Austria there are many woman filmmakers but many also claim about the bad conditions.

Why are you a filmmaker and how does working with film help you tell your story?

Making movies was, and is, the only thing I wanted to do. It makes me happy, full, and live worth it. Besides my family :-)

In your film, the testimonies of women who have experienced human trafficking are told by non-actors filmed in their work place and who could have witnessed such tragedy. Why was it important for you to create this kind of mise-en-scene ?

There are three documentary layers in the movie: the stories of the woman are true, the people who tell the stories are amateur actors in their real lives and, most important, the places where it could have happened are real: the border is real, the brothel is real and also the diplomatic household. So these three documentary layers are mixed together and they give something new.

Normally when you see a documentary about trafficking in woman, the woman tells her story and she cries. She has this black thing over her eyes etc. What you feel is that you pity her. I wanted to take away the pity from the woman – and talk about the things they need. They do not need pity, they need to have rights. A different law situation concerning migration as it is now.

So I separated the stories from the woman to give a look on the pure stories themselves. On the conditions that make them happen.

I was certainly concerned with questioning prevalent documentary methods. Does the victim always have to tell their own story? On the other hand, can someone else recite the story but nevertheless still communicate something of the person? I am concerned with this grey area.

Was it difficult to persuade the protagonists to take part in the film? Were they afraid of being connected with human trafficking?

To find the amateur actors was for sure a big part. We made a long street casting to find them. When someone was found, I accompanied them in their all day life for days, months and years.

And then I rehearsed with them very, very much.

The diplomatic woman I asked again before we shot: are you really sure you want to do this? And she said yes. But for sure it was not easy for them.

They had to deal with these stories, to think about them, to connect them with their own life. This was part of our work. But they were not afraid of being connected with human trafficking because they knew they are doing something against it.

How or where did you find the stories of the women?

The stories are based on true stories, on interviews. They come lefö, an ngo in Vienna who works in the field of trafficking woman, and also from women themselves. It was agreed with lefö that the women should not be able to be identified. It deals with real, exemplary narratives from specific areas in which trafficking in women takes place such as where women are sold into prostitution or, for example, where they have to work, effectively as slaves, in diplomatic households.

Could you choose your favorite scene in your film or an anecdote related to it and tell us what you particularly like about it?

I am often asked if the waiter really hurts his head in this scene or if he plays it…yes, he plays it. While I was rehearsing with this people I asked everything very exactly: how do you start work every day, where do you give the ashes etc. While we were doing this he was awkward, he often hurt himself. So I wrote it back in the script and he also had to do it while we shot.