FEM* RIOT: PUSHING BOUNDARIES
The patriarchy defines a woman to the extent that she fits within the countless limits and restrictions it sets. It defines and recognizes. Going beyond these boundaries through the traditional patriarchal lens means undermining one's "female" gender identity. Women who dare to do so still need to prove that they are women in order not to be marginalized by the social structure.
Over time, these boundaries expand, loosen, and weaken, which can make it seem as if we have achieved the desired equality or at least reached the finish line. However, being a woman still means keeping silent about many topics that constitute our everyday life, both physiological and psycho-emotional. Forced silence becomes a serious obstacle in the struggle for subjectivity and visibility, and we have to look for forms through which we can communicate to the world what it means to be a woman in the twenty-first century in an environmentally friendly and safe way. Independent cinema is becoming one of them.
Each film in this program is a kind of protest practice, because it problematizes and highlights what is beyond the scope of conventional topics for public conversation: painful menstruation, breast shape variations, female homosexuality, fear of intimacy. But their most important role may be to deconstruct internalized boundaries in the perception of women themselves.
Curated by Sasha Prokopenko
Screening duration: 78 min
Trigger and content warnings: medical misogyny, implications of rape, human trafficking, nudity
The films are screened in OV with Ukrainian and English subtitles
The films are available online in Ukraine, Poland, Czechia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Germany
18 November / 20:40 / Zhovten Cinema, Classic hall
Konstantinovskaya St, 26
19 November / 18:40 / Zhovten Cinema, Classic hall
Konstantinovskaya St, 26
20 November / 20:50 / KINO 42, Konstantinovskaya St, 11B
LOVE, BARBARA / 2023
Brydie O’Connor
Barbara Hammer has been called a pioneer of lesbian experimental cinema. A filmmaker, artist, and performer, she explored the history of oppression and emancipation of women and queer people since the beginning of the last century and relayed it through a complex and inventive film language, fighting for the right of women to have a public female gaze that is "artistic, not voyeuristic."
The film offers a look at excerpts from Barbara's work and life through the eyes of Florrie Burke, with whom the director lived for over thirty years. After the death of her beloved, Florrie plunges into her archives, which gives at least the illusion of intimacy. This optic immediately brings us closer to both protagonists, making them accessible and understandable.
The film speaks the language of all-encompassing love. It is a laconic but very tender, delicate and sentimental work, and all the means of expression here work to create and capture exactly these feelings and emotions between the audience and the screen.
IT HAPPENED AT HOME / 2022
Apolline Pilley, Sydney Oberfeld
Hugging, kissing, talking, eye contact — these are all forms of intimacy. Its variability provides much-needed freedom, but it is constantly under the threat of stigmatization and non-recognition. Mass culture has long defined sex between a man and a woman as the most acceptable form of intimacy, while demonstrating exactly how it should be — openly unattainable, unrealistic. But there is another culture. It creates an emancipatory time-space in which we have the right to self-explore and establish our own principles of interaction with ourselves and our close ones.
This film is a fragment of such a culture. In a light, somewhat playful way, it brings together stories of pleasure and fear, comfort and discomfort. In several fragile but emotionally intense scenes, the heroes and heroines test their boundaries in intimacy and learn to articulate their own needs. And we are unobtrusively invited to learn along with them.
The film pays special attention to physical space: the careful, caring detailing of the characters' everyday life works to immerse us in the scene as much as possible. Watching the film, you feel as if you are at a good friend's house, and the whole world around you is just an endless reel of warm, coarse-grained film.
Subarna Dash, Vidushi Gupta
Breasts are perhaps the most mystified part of a woman's body. Mass culture, including movies directed by men, imposes complex and often contradictory stereotypes about how they should look. It unifies the appearance and manifestations of breasts to a non-existent ideal, masking their real diversity.
The film unhooks this tight capitalist bra and, on its own level, rediscovers the diversity of women's experiences with breasts. We find ourselves in a cozy room with warm lighting, where the girls share stories about how their mammary glands were formed and the domestic and psychological problems that accompanied this process. Their dialogue is light, trusting and frank, devoid of shame and stigma. It forms a metaphysical therapeutic space in which the audience can recall and reflect on their own experience.
The filmmakers use various animation techniques, and include footage from popular movies, film photography, and collage. In this way, the film resembles a girl's diary with entries and drawings. It is only behind the stereotypical gender-accented form that we find a distinctly emancipatory content.
THIS IS TMI / 2023
ALL UP THERE / 2020
Bonnie Macrae
United Kingdom / 7 min
20-something Eilidh desperately seeks answers from her GP after debilitating pain presses pause on her life.
A.I. POETRIES OF FEMALE AND NON-FEMALE BEINGS IN GAS STATIONS AT NIGHT / 2022
Cristina Elena Iliescu
Romania / 19 min
How should one closely navigate female and non-binary experience through virtual mediation? This experimental documentary casts a type of gaze that transcends the boundaries of concrete reality, looking for the human factor within generally accessible technologies.
This is a film about questioning your own limits of reality and gender as well; about the gaze that melts matter into pixels; about the frame that holds in it a type of perception trained for hours inside a smartphone screen; about concrete poetry written by iPhone’s predictive text function.
BIRD / 2023
Ana Cristina Barragán
Ecuador, Spain / 22 min
Gathered in a shelter in an Ecuadorian forest, adolescent victims of sex trafficking take their tentative first steps in their newly recovered lives.
Text: Mariia Vasylieva
