The 8th International Women’s Film Festival will be held in France between March 28th and April 1st 2001.
At a festival given over to the thematic subjects of love, kissing and sexuality, a look at pornography should not go amiss. After all, the grand porn debate keeps flaring up - and not just in various feminist corners - as we have recently seen with “Romance” and “Baise-Moi”. The distinction between art and pornography that moral custodians and critics like to draw is becoming increasingly blurred all the time.
The festival program includes films from Italy, France, the USA, Finland, Canada and Japan.
According to festival’s website, the program will be unveiling pornography from different angles. The women directors of the films selected either deconstruct the pornographic images and aesthetics, or recuperate them. In “Removed”, for instance, Naomi Uman processes the actual film material in that she obliterates the female object of desire out of the porn celluloid. In “Sailors' Girls”, Marianne Stoll takes the viewer on a guided tour round a rubber doll factory. Her schematically composed aesthetic pictures render any sexual response to the dolls impossible. Standing by the screen during her program entitled “Her Story of Porn”, the inimitable Annie Sprinkle will be showing highlights from the more than 150 sex movies in her career and providing a direct commentary. According to Linda Williams, Annie "has changed the face of pornography, created new possibilities for the representation of sexuality, and battled censorship every step of the way".
A small selection of porn films from the silent film era in France are the only "real" porn movies to be seen in the program. Including “Fatima” which, shown at the 1895 World Exposition Chicago, caused a huge sensation. By 1907, the Chicago Board of Censors forbade any further uncensored viewings of Fatima erotically swaying her breasts and hips. The bars retouched into the print are as hilarious now as they were then.
The Kids and Youth Film Week to be held parallel to the 8th International Film Festival has now grown out of its infancy and can claim its own rightful place in Dortmund alongside the film programs for the "adults". Over the week, we will be offering a total of ten films in two separate strands that will appeal to all age groups between six and eighteen.
In addition to topicality, two criteria were used in selecting the films: on the one hand, the overall theme of the Festival and, on the other, films made by women directors. What might sound like a restrictive strategy was easily vindicated this year. Four of the films on show are the work of young female directors – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
