Eleven interesting and pulsating documentary films can be found in these years Women's Film Days Programme. These documentaries give women a voice when they are silenced and focus as well on women who speak for these silenced people. Five of them are productions from German-language territory.
Mädchen am Ball – Girls on the pitch by Aysun Bademsoy is – featuring the EURO 2008 – the portrait of a Turkish girls soccer club from Berlin, which has to struggle with prejudices and discriminations.
Von heute an is a documentation from Uli Bez about a part of women's culture- and women's politics-history by visiting Anke Schäfer, a lesbian fighter for the women's movement.
A further portrait in the programme is Annie Leibovitz – Life through a lens from her sister Barbara with „celeb-factor” but nevertheless hearty. Remarkable sisters are also the two Shoshone-Sisters in Our Land, Our Life who fight for their territory against the US-government and who were awarded with the alternative Nobel Prize for this engagement.
Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor for the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) fights in Carlas List for the arrests of the last left war-crime-fugitives. In Rule of Law Austrian director Susanne Brandstätter presents the efforts of a UN-judge to found a democracy in Kosovo – and was awarded with the Viennese Film Prize.
Queens of Sounds by Austrian director Sandra Krampelhuber lights the long neglected situation of women in Reggae and Dancehall in Jamaica.
Star-director Wim Wenders deals in his episode of the movie Invisibles with sexual assaults on women in Congo. Four displaced girls in the film Sacrifice have also to deal with sexual assaults.
Working Mom shows up the cultural differences and highlights globalisation based on a homecoming mother, and Maimouna a young woman in Burkina Faso fights against female genital mutilation.
GV/EV - german/english version
ogs/oes - original with german/english subtitles
Limor Phinasov and Yaron Kaftori, Israel/Bolivia 2006
80 min., Documentary, DVD, Colour, oes
In 1990, 22-year-old Marisa Villozial, left her 3-year-old son and her infant daughter with her parents in Bolivia and travelled oversee to look for a job in the West. She spent fifteen years doing hard menial labour in Israel, sending her wage home, following the growth of her children only through periodic phone calls. In February 2005, Marisa returned to Bolivia to reunite with her children and family and tried to become a real mother. A story which demonstrates the extremes individuals will go to in order to save their families – sometimes saving and losing them in the same act.
Barbara Leibovitz, USA 2007
90 min., Documentary, DVD, Colour, EV
Annie Leibovitz has created some of the most memorable photographic portraits. As Chiefphotographer of the Rolling Stone her intimate portraits of numerous musical legends she helped define the look of the magazine. The pictures of John Lennon and Yoko Ono (1980), taken just a couple of hours before Lennon's assassination, are among the most famous of her works. Since 1983, Leibovitz has worked as a portrait photographer for Vanity Fair and has become a star among star photographers. Leibovitz had a close romantic relationship with noted writer and essayist Susan Sontag.
Even though this movie is filled with celebrities like Demi Moore, Michail Barishnikov, George Clooney or Patti Smith and their flattering comments, filmmaker and biographer Barbara Leibovitz managed to show her sister as a living and thinking person.
Marcel Schüpbach, Switzerland 2006
96 min., Documentary, DVD, Colour, ogs
In the heart of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a woman is fighting for the detention of the last war-crime-fugitives: Prosecutor Carla del Ponte. The filmcrew accompanied her and her team for five months during her efforts to arrest Ratko Mladic, Radovan Karadzic and Ante Gotovina.
Still, there are fugitives at large and del Ponte manhunts them tirelessly but it is not easy: As she does not have empowerment over her own police, she depends on the – mainly missing – assistance of the affected countries.
The mothers of Srebrenica, who lost their husbands and sons in the massacre of Srebrenica in July 1995, also get a word. These women doubt that the international tribunal can bring them justice for their losses. It has been 11 years that the massacre took place and the work of the ICTY and del Ponte is soon coming to an end.
By showing changing scenes between the „cool” investigation of del Ponte and the highly emotional statements and pictures of the women, Carlas List, kind of a „documentary thriller”, presents an interesting, very close and not-sugarcoated view behind the scenes of the ICTY.
Wim Wenders and Fernando Leon de Aranoa
D.R. Kongo/Uganda 2007
50 min., Documentary-episode, DVD, Colour, ogs
The „invisibles” are those we refuse to see as well as those who never stop caring for them. Directors Wim Wenders and Fernando Leon de Aranoa each contributed for the film from Javier Bardem one of five episodes.
Wim Wenders tells in his episode „Invisible Crimes” about sexual assaults on women in Congo. For his episode „Good Night, Ouma”, Fernando Leon de Aranoa travelled to Uganda, to a region where war has taken place for 20 years. He shows some of several thousand children who walk every night to avoid being kidnapped by a fanatic guerrilla group who wants to recruit them as children soldiers.
The film was produced in collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières and has won the Goya-Award recently.
Foto: © Wim Wenders
Aysun Bademsoy, Germany 1995
45 min., Documentary, DVD, Colour, GV
They are training twice a week and on the weekends they are playing soccer: 23 girls from Berlin Kreuzberg in their team BSC-Agrispor – the only Turkish women’s soccer club in Europe.
In the beginning it was difficult to get the permission from the parents for the girls: to play football instead of helping their mothers in the household; hours, sometimes days, out of control of their families.
Girls on the Pitch is not only the portrait of a women's soccer club, but is also the portrait of a group of girls, who have to deal with prejudices and oppositions in daily life and who have to find their place between the Turkish culture, their parents and their own dreams.
Fabiola Maldonado und Ulrike Sülzle, Burkina Faso/Germany 2006
60 min., Documentary, DVD, Colour, ogs
The 23-year-old amiable Maimouna, who is a real fighter by nature, rides by moped from village to village in the countryside of Burkina Faso. There she discusses openly and thoroughly the genital mutilation of young girls and its consequences. Again and again she clashes with superstitions, fears, adverse power structures, contradictions and – her own wounds.
Beth und George Gage, USA 2006
75 min, Documentary, DVD, Colour, EV
Carrie and Mary Dann, two elderly Shoshone sisters, are engaged in a thirty-year battle for rights to their own land. They graze their animals on the open range outside their ranch – a range that was recognized as Western Shoshone land by the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley. The U.S. government unlawfully seized a significant parcel of Shoshone territory in 1974, beginning a battle that went to the Supreme Court and beyond, and inciting humanitarian intervention from organizations including Amnesty International and the United Nations. Directors Beth and George Gage eloquently piece together the story of the long and tireless efforts that two incredible women put toward securing indigenous rights in the United States. This is a film that reveals shocking information about crimes that continue to be committed against Native Americans.
For their engagement, the Dann Sisters were awarded the alternative Nobel Prize in 1993.
Sandra Krampelhuber, Austria/Jamaica 2006
74 min., Documentary, DVD, Colour, ogs
Jamaica, island of recording studios: Susanne Kramplhuber explores for the first time the long neglected female side of Reggae and Dancehall music in Jamaica. Three generations of women in the Jamaican music business tell us about their role in past and present their first steps into the career, their struggle for acceptance in a male-dominated business, their life paths and big success. Their rhymes and plates, as well as their view of their own personalities oscillate between emancipation, religiosity and „slackness”.
World-famous musicians, such as Marcia Griffiths, Sasha, Queen Ifrica, Macka Diamond and Lady G, as well as women behind the scenes, for example Dr. Carolyn Cooper (Professor for Cultural Studies, University of the West Indies) Barbara Makeda Blake Hannah (Rastafari Activist, Journalist) or Sandra Joy Alcott (founder of JAFA – Jamaica Association of Female Artists), give us an understanding of Jamaica's music scene from a female point of view and sociological insight into Dancehall culture.
Foto: © Philipp Kroll
Susanne Brandstätter, Austria/Kosovo 2006
99 min., Documentary, DVD, Colour, ogs
UNO-judge Claudia Fenz arrives optimistically and full of illusions in Prizren. But the day-to-day frustrations loom large. Against the backdrop of Kosovo, the documentary studies Fenz's attempts to establish democracy in a country where the concept is largely unknown. The Documentary of Susanne Brandstätter explains by using personal stories a fundamental problem confronting today's world: our own ideas of right and wrong vs. the ideas of others.
Susanne Brandstätter was awarded for her documentation Rule of Law with the Viennese film price 2007.
Ellen Bruno, Thailand/Burma 1999
50 min., Documentary, DVD, Colour, EV
Each year thousands of young girls are recruited from rural Burmese villages to work in the sex industry in neighbouring Thailand. Held for years in debt bondage in illegal Thai brothels, they suffer extreme abuse by pimps, clients, and the police.
In her sobering yet poetic film Sacrifice, Ellen Bruno presents the terribly moving accounts of four young girls from Burma who were virtually kidnapped from their homes and forced into a life of prostitution in Thailand. As with all her films Bruno approaches difficult issues with the intent of uncovering hard truths and giving voice to people who are too often marginalized.
Uli Bez, Germany 2007
70 min., Documentary, DVD, Colour, GV
Filmmaker Uli Bez meets forewomen of the german women's literature scene Anke Schäfer at the „lesbian retirement residency” SAFIA in Charlottenburg, where she looks back on her eventful life, her involvement in the feminist movement of the 1970's and 80's and her accomplishments as publisher and distributor since the founding of her first women's bookshop in Wiesbaden.