| Lessons from the Film Screening Pit |
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| Written by Leslie Vryenhoek | |||||||
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What does screening over 600 films made by women teach a person? Over the past three years, I've watched something like 600 movies...and right now there's another shopping bag full of them waiting for me in the living room. Sometimes I think I must be nuts to keep volunteering my summer away, screening entries to the St. John's International Women's Film Festival. Most of the time, though, I think there's no way I would have missed this lens-eye view of the world. I've seen feature-length dramas and shorts and short shorts, documentaries of every length on every subject and more fabulous and freaky experimental films than I can count. I love those experimentals; so much colour and crazy effects, and you can knock off three or four of them in a single glass of wine. Of course, with all that tilting, it's best to switch to documentaries before the next glass. You can overdue it on the whirligig. The documentaries are an education in themselves. I now know something about Kenyan politics and the history of cappuccino, about lawn chemicals and brain chemicals and the lives of painters and composers and circus performers. I've seen at least four sex changes, and I can tell you that vibrators are outlawed in six southern states. What all these films have in common is that a woman had a hand in making them, whether as the writer, producer, director, or all of the above. If you think that's unimportant in this enlightened, equitable age, think again. According to The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women in the Top 250 Films of 2005, a report by researcher Marie Lauzon in California, women comprised just 17% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic (U.S.) grossing films. Nineteen years ago, St. John's was the first city in Canada to see the need and launch a women's film festival. Now, more than 500 films pour in to the festival office every year, and they all have to be watched, passed around, discussed and voted on. In the end, about 80 make it into the festival's five day program in October. I won't pretend to have liked everything I've seen. Some movies are clumsy and wooden, and others try so hard to be deep that you almost drown in them. An awful lot are just way too damn long. I've been known to put the vacuum in the middle of the living room, and when the urge to turn it on overwhelms the urge to finish watching the current flick, I give up on it. But good or bad, they all seem to contain some overarching truths. Here are a few I've gleaned from my first 600 movies:
I hope you get a chance to take in the St. John's International Women's Film Festival some October. What you'll see is just a small slice of the life lessons women are putting on film, but it might just be enough to change the way you see the world. Visit the festival’s website at http://www.womensfilmfestival.com/ for more information. Comments (0)
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