feministwomensmediafestival - Tumblr blog

[feministwomensmediafestival]

FWMF - Sunday

Theme: Borders Panelists: Hong-An Truong, Mimi Nguyen, Nilita Vachani Moderator: Eng-Beng Lim From the frontier, which is the first line of colonial genocide, to contested states, which are the loci of geopolitical struggle, borders have captured attention as sites of spectacle, signifying citizenship and social death, mobility and precariousness, security and vulnerability, limits and frames. This panel is organized around questions of borderization and borderlessness, of sexual formation as it lines up with and against political, socio-economic, and racial bordering. It brings together scholars and practitioners to reflect on the relation between gender, sexuality, and nation-state sovereignty; new forms of capital, labor, and consumption; the status of colonized people within global flows after neoliberal adjustments; and the structures of forced displacement, trafficking, deportation, and the illegalization of human beings. Illuminating the regional specificity of South Asia, East Asia, the European Union, and USA in our world system, the panel on Borders thinks through contemporary globalization and its mediation.

[feministwomensmediafestival]

FWMF - Saturday

Theme: Archives Panelists: Cauleen Smith, Rhea Combs, Portia Cobb Moderator: Karen Baxter What is worth saving, and what gets thrown away? The power to decide between preservation/restoration OR cultural and material obscurity has long been the domain of the archivist. It is no secret that pioneering works by early women and African-American media producers have not received adequate archival resources, and thereby have dropped out of cultural visibility—not to mention out of material availability. Drawing together fragments from African-American media history curating, Afrofuturist filmmaking, and experimental video about "politics of place and identity"—from West Africa to West Philadelphia—this panel will broaden the field of traditional archival studies. The panelists, moderator, and audience members will all be invited to reconsider our orientations towards the archive without privileging experiences of loss, death, and lack—or, conversely, the myopic nostalgia that seduces us to romanticize and unify the archival-cultural ruins that we inherit unto the present day. Thinking about the complexity of identity categories—race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, class, age—through the non-synchronous temporality of our media archives, we will come up with new narratives for understanding our own material relations to history: from the absent past, to the impossible present, to the precarious future.

[feministwomensmediafestival]

FWMF - Friday

Keynote: Nanita Das

[feministwomensmediafestival]

The Feminist & Women’s Media Festival, put together by members of Brown University’s department of modern culture and media, will be held in Providence from Friday through Sunday. The festival will include...

[feministwomensmediafestival]

The Feminist and Women’s Media Festival is taking over the Granoff Center and the Cable Car Cinema for a series of free events this weekend.

[feministwomensmediafestival]

This is the second part of an interview that Bluestockings conducted with Beth Capper and Maggie Hennefeld, two of the organizers of the Feminist and Women’s Media Festival in Providence. The FWMF ...

[feministwomensmediafestival]

Maggie Hennefeld and Beth Capper are PhD candidates in the Modern Culture and Media department at Brown University.  They have organized a Feminist and Women’s Media Festival, with three other grad...

[feministwomensmediafestival]

[feministwomensmediafestival]

Akosua Adoma Owusu, selected works & Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi

Me Broni Ba (My White Baby) (Akosua Adoma Owusu, 2009, 22 min) Split Ends, I Feel Wonderful (Akosua Adoma Owusu, 2012, 5 min) Kwaku Ananse (Akosua Adoma Owusu, 2013, 25 min) Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu, 2009, 21 min)

Still from Akosua Adoma Owusu's Kwaku Ananse.

The films of Ghanaian-American filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu trace the legacies of European colonialism in Africa, the circuitous routes through which U.S.-centric versions of the African imaginary travel between Ghana and the U.S. and the rich heritage of West African storytelling. As Nzingha Kendall writes for Black Camera, Owusu explores how “blackness is intertwined with displacement and memory and how they engage with the construction of individual and collective identity.” In Me Broni Ba (My White Baby) (2009), Owusu explores the entanglement of female beauty standards with power through a meditation on black hairstyles. Split Ends, I Feel Wonderful (2012) continues in this vein, but this time through a celebration of 1970s Afro hairstyles. Kwaku Ananse (2013), meanwhile, stems from Owusu’s desire to keep alive the tale of Kwaku Ananse, a West African folktale told to her by her father. According to Owusu’s website, Kwaku Ananse is “a trickster in West African stories who appears as both spider and man. Ananse teaches us that there are two sides to everything and everyone. The fable of Kwaku Ananse is combined with the story of a young outsider named Nyan Koronhwea attending her estranged father's funeral. At the funeral, she retreats to the woods in search for her father.”  

Still from Wanuri Kahiu's Pumzi.

Owusu’s films will be screened with Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu’s film Pumzi (2009), a dystopian narrative set 35 years after an ecological disaster in which people have been left without water and survive on recycled urine. Inhabitants of this new world are told that “the outside is dead,” yet Asha, the film’s lead protagonist, learns differently when she discovers a seed that begins to grow and escapes the enclosed compound to the world outside. Pumzi is a film that celebrates life, love and imagination through an exploration of the creative and fugitive practices that sustain the everyday survival of black lives.

[feministwomensmediafestival]

Mother of the River

Zeinabu Irene Davis, 1995, 28 min

Set in the 1850s, a young black slave girl named Dofimae meets and befriends a magical woman in the woods called Mother of the River. Through their friendship Dofimae learns about independence, honor, humility, and respect for others. A poignant exploration of family, heritage, and tradition told from a child’s perspective.

[feministwomensmediafestival]

Portia Cobb selected works

Drive By Shoot, 1993, 11 min Cobb describes this early work as an illustration of her "process of archiving, recycling, and constructing." She writes: "Once upon a time I described this work as a time-capsule. I now think of it more as an auto-document(ary). It locates my early interest in telling stories about place. It is what I now think best situates my work in experimental ethnography. Fragments, like memory, disjuncture and interruption are my aesthetic."

Tenderness, 2006, 3:36 min A memorial to a fallen friend. 

A Crowing Hen: Remedies, Cures and Superstitions, 2008, 3:45 min A memorial to a fallen friend.

Bottle Tree: A blessed memorial, 2009, 9:18 min

[feministwomensmediafestival]

Magic Lantern Presents: BODY/VOICE: WOMEN’S EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA

It is often noted that men and women inhabit space very differently, as evidenced by the popular Tumblr account, Men Taking Up Too Much Space on the Train. Photo after photo show male passengers with legs maximally splayed and arms raised to grasp a Very Important Newspaper, while women demurely cross their arms and legs with visible signs of discomfort. It doesn’t take a professional philosopher or sociologist to realize that this stark contrast between spatial expansion and contraction is not a fact of biology but a set of learned behaviors. For most women, something has broken in the unifying chain of consciousness/body/world; an institutionalized double standard ensures that men enjoy the lion’s share of free, unhindered, fluid movement in space. The films in this program demonstrate various ways in which women filmmakers have sought to engage more fully with their world, oscillating between the savage critique of social norms and the affirmation of new powers and pleasures. It goes without saying that cinema, with its disjuncture of image and sound, its capacity for metamorphosis and even the grotesque, is one of the most powerful tools we have for the reconfiguration of body and voice. 

Betzy Bromberg & Laura Ewig, Marasmus, 1981, 24 mins, color/sound, 16mm Gunvor Nelson, Schmeerguntz, 1966, 14 mins, b&w/sound, 16mm Marjorie Keller, She/Va, 1973, 3 mins, color/silent, 8mm on DVD Sharon Couzin, Roseblood, 1974, 8 mins, color/sound, 16mm Maria Lassnig, Iris, 1971, 10 mins, color/sound, 16mm Cecelia Condit, Not a Jealous Bone, 1987, 11 mins, color/sound, DVD Jennet Thomas, SHARONY!, 2000, 11 mins, color/sound, DVD Cathy Sisler, Aberrant Motion #1, 1993, 11 mins, b&w/sound, DVD Aneta Grzeszykowska, Headache, 2008, 12 mins, b&w/sound, digital video

More information at: http://magiclanterncinema.com/calendar/2014/bodyvoice/

[feministwomensmediafestival]

Adaptation Fever

Hong-An Truong, 2006-2007, 20 mins

A combination of four video works, Truong’s Adaptation Fever uses found footage from Viet Nam’s period as colonial French Indochina to visually negotiate questions of translation, sentiment, and temporality. According to Truong, her project “explores questions about the politics of representation and the construction of difference in relation to history, time, and memory. The split screen and juxtaposition become a simple technique whereby the “real” and by extension, its historical referent, are permanently deferred objects, further diminished through the overdubbed narratives in Vietnamese and French which are only briefly summarized in English subtitles.” A reflection upon the condition of colonial nostalgia in postcolonial times, Adaptation Fever consists of four videos, namely The Past is a Distant Colony (9:00), A Story in the Process of Self-Alienation (5:00), It’s True Because It’s Absurd (3:00), and Explosions in the Sky (3:00).

[feministwomensmediafestival]

The "Depression" Screening

Chocolate Cake (JoAnn Elam, date unknown, 4min) Daytime Television (JoAnn Elam, date unknown, 4min) Apologies (Anne Charlotte Robertson, 1986, 17min) Five Year Diary, Reel 23: A Breakdown After the Mental Hospital (Anne Charlotte Robertson, 1982, 27min) The Blazing World (Jessica Bardsley, 2013, 18min) Land of Mourning Calm (Jessica Bardsley, 2010, 13min) A Past of Plank and Nail (Jessica Bardsley, 2013, 6.5min)

In her book Heroines (2012) author Kate Zambreno narrates her life through the struggles of female modernists who were institutionalized, silenced and erased by their famous husbands. It is a book that is in part about how personal instances of female depression intersect with the political and social conditions in which women find themselves, or what feminist theorist Ann Cvetkovich might call the sense of “public feeling” that stems from trying to survive in a world that is inimical to your survival. But Heroines is also a book that critically comments on the spaces opened up by everyday memoir writing for both mediating depression and dwelling within it. Following Zambreno’s lead, but transposing the question to the moving image, this program explores the relationship between political depression and the genre of personal filmmaking. Rather than trying to offer any kind of comprehensive study of these intersections, the “Depression” screening brings together the work of three U.S. filmmakers who – while occupying distinct sociopolitical times and spaces – examine gendered experiences of depression, anxiety and rage.

The “Depression” screening begins with two short works by Chicago filmmaker JoAnn Elam, which wryly and obliquely comment on feeling simultaneously excluded from avenues of creative expression while entrapped by compulsory domesticity. Chocolate Cake (c.1970), in which Elam makes a cake from start to finish and then proceeds to stomp on it, was a film she made in response to an evening where a group of male artists came over to her apartment and ignored both her and the chocolate cake she made for the occasion. Daytime Television (c.1970), meanwhile, sees Elam juxtaposing repetitive imagery of household products with The Beatles’ You Like Me Too Much (the lyrics to which go, “If you leave me, I will follow you and bring you back where you belong”) in order to highlight the oppressive dynamics of male-female relationships.

Following Elam’s works are two longer pieces by Anne Charlotte Robertson, whose super 8mm diary films documenting her own mental breakdowns span a period of over 30 years. In Apologies (1986), Robertson sends up the gendered compulsion to apologize, while in Five Year Diary, Reel 23: A Breakdown After the Mental Hospital (1982) she brings together footage she recorded during one of her breakdowns and comments on the impetus behind some of the scenes filmed. The result is an affecting, and at times hilarious, window into the different states of another person’s emotional world.

Jessica Bardsley uses personal filmmaking to activate landscapes, household interiors, and archival objects in order explore how we mediate our depressive emotional lives through the imagined or real lives of others. In The Blazing World (2013) Bardsley assembles and intertwines stock footage of female kleptomaniacs, news reports of Winona Ryder shoplifting, scenes from the film Girl, Interrupted (1999), starring Ryder, and Bardsley’s own experiences of stealing, in order to imagine kleptomania as a distinctively suburban female expression of boredom, rage and depression.

In epistolary essay film Land of Mourning Calm (2010), landscape becomes suffused with feelings of desire, longing, misconnection and loss, as Bardsley charts the social and political conditions that drive a wedge two women in a long-distance relationship – one American, the other South Korean. By contrast, in A Past of Plank and Nail (2013) the cold, empty rooms of Emily Dickinson’s homestead in Amherst are shored up as spaces that might enable reparative and therapeutic encounters with another’s anguish. Bardsley’s film draws pleasure from its surroundings and constructs a sensory and visual space that the viewer can occupy. It asks us to see the house as a resource that is at once haunted by Emily’s presence while at the same time available to new inhabitants. The film exemplifies what queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman has described as Eroto-Historiography, where pleasurable experiences of material remains offer new modes of understanding how the past endures into the present.

[feministwomensmediafestival]

The Switch

The Switch promotional pilot (Amy Fox, 2013, 8 min) The Switch trailer (Amy Fox, 2013, 2 min)

Sü Phan was a successful software manager…until she came out to her company as a trans woman. Now evicted from her apartment and forced to stay with an ex in the “East Vancouver queer underground,” this new television series (currently premiering on Canada’s OutTV network) takes both a magical realist and a comedic look at the trials and tribulations of social inequity while living on the margins. Released in 2013, this promotional web pilot and trailer give a glimpse into the daily experiences of transgendered individuals who navigate separate worlds and struggle “to build a sense of community out of their disparate lives.”

To support the project and Trembling Void Studios, please visit: http://www.welovetheswitch.com