Round Table: Hurdlers: 50 years of feminist film work
Helke Sander, Sara Fazilat, Maria Furtwängler
A conversation with Helke Sander, Sara Fazilat and Maria Furtwängler.
“If they take your sword, grab the cudgel” is the introductory text by Helke Sander, which she published in issue No. 1 of the magazine Frauen und Film in 1974. The first feminist film magazine in Europe also inspired the founding of femme totale, the women’s film festival in Dortmund, in 1987. We will read selected passages from the militant text as impulses to elaborate current positions and to draw a bow from Frauen und Film to the effects of Pro Quote Film and the MaLisa Foundation. What hurdles in feminist film work had to be overcome then and still have to be overcome today are reported by the hurdlers themselves: Our jury members this year are record breakers in the field of feminist film production: Helke Sander, Maria Furtwängler and Sara Fazilat, activists from three generations for equal film work, talk about power redistribution, production conditions, political movements, female imagery, knowledge transfer and the transmission of the feminist legacy.
Helke Sander
The director and writer is one of the key figures in West Germany’s new women’s movement. She was a successful theatre and television director in Finland—and a mother—before studying film at the DFFB in Berlin from 1966. She co-founded the Kinderladen movement, the 1st International Women’s Film Seminar in Berlin and in 1974 she founded the magazine Frauen und Film, which made an important contribution to the debate about feminism and film aesthetics. Her films include The All-Round Reduced Personality, Love Is the Beginning of All Terror, Liberators Take Liberties, and many more. She taught as a professor at HFBK Hamburg, among others, until 2001.
Sara Fazilat
The actor, producer and screenwriter studied in London, Berlin and New York. Her anti-racism graduation film Nico was her international breakthrough. Fazilat produced the film, played the lead role and helped write the script. She received the Max Ophüls Award and the First Steps No Fear Award, among others. She then appeared in Bully Herbig’s A Thousand Lines and Holy Spider by Ali Abbasi, among others. Fazilat was a member of the board of Pro Quote Film and in 2020 founded the production company Third Culture Kids. She is currently working on scripts for the feature film Arier and the series Underdogs.
Maria Furtwängler
The actor, producer and medical doctor is the co-founder of the MaLisa Foundation, which aims to overcome restrictive role models, among other things. Furtwängler has received numerous awards for her charitable work and acting roles. She has embodied the character of Tatort police detective Charlotte Lindholm since 2002, and played the role of a development aid worker in Isabelle Stever’s feature film The Weather Inside, a rock singer in Nachts Baden by Ariane Zeller and a troubled driving school teacher in the TNT comedy original Ausgebremst, which she developed with her production company Atalante Film.
