International Debut Feature Film Competition

International Debut Feature Film Competition

There are more and more of them!

The two feature film competitions organised each year by the Women’s Film Festival, alternating between Dortmund and Cologne, offer both the established filmmaker and the up-and-coming newcomer a highly regarded platform. In Cologne in 2012, eight talents are again our guests, presenting their first full-length feature films and competing for the prize of 10,000 Euros. The aim is to encourage women directors to continue making films. We would like to support careers such as that of Claudia Llosa. The Peruvian woman won the debut award in Cologne in 2006, in 2009 she won the Golden Bear for her second feature film The Milk of Sorrow and in 2012 she won the Teddy Short Film Award in Berlin.

The good news is that there are more and more of them! The list of the preselection, with more than 150 current debut feature films from over 50 countries, is longer than ever before. Banal, but true: the films are as varied as they are in number. It is impossible to talk about a clear trend. And yet this year, certain topics are apparent. On The Edge, the title of the Moroccan contribution from Leila Kilani, highlights the mood of the many, mostly female protagonists in the competition films. These women are at a crossroads. There is a decisive tension surrounding their – often lonely – struggle for autonomy and their search for themselves. You don’t really want to pick a fight with them: Badia and Imane shell shrimps in the harbour of Tangier. Like thousands of other Moroccan women, they have been lured by the promises of the global market. The young women are soon sick of the humiliating working conditions and they take for themselves what the world refuses them. US soldier Kelli believes that she has defended the achievements of western democracy. Return, the story of her return home after a tour of duty, is the study of depression in a depressing world. But however low they may fall, the directors never leave their protagonists without their dignity. Waitress Nana hasseasonal work on the Black Sea coast. She is all alone here and knows no-one, just like the policeman and the street child, whose paths cross in Salt White, but her attitude is laconic and confident.

The sexualisation of arthouse cinema is also reflected in the competition. An unsparing and taboo-free sexuality, freed from relationship options, like the cathartic chamber play Nuit #1 by Anne Emond. She makes a study of a onenight- stand that is as rugged as it is intimate. Utopian moments are achieved by the directing duo of Delphine and Muriel Coulin in 17 Girls, from the bizarre pact made by a group of schoolgirls, who all get pregnant at the same time. 17 pregnant young women develop a huge power of the imagination, at least for one summer.+

Filmmakers strikingly often associate the yearning of their protagonists with narratives whose second main character is nature, such as the metaphorical coming-of-age drama Zephyr. Rejected by her mother, one-year-old Zephyr lives with her grandparents in the majestic mountain landscape of northern Turkey. Equally remote is the world of the once splendid coffee haciendas in the Vale do Paraíba in Brazil, where a young female photographer turns up. Stories only exist if people remember them. And so, in an amusingly melancholic way, Julia Murat preserves an era and a way of life from being forgotten, in Histórias que só existem quando lembradas. Another place of longing is Spain, in Anja Salomonowitz’s film of the same name. Spain as a metaphor for stability and security, for the happiness that all figures are looking for in three intelligently intertwined narrative threads.

_Stefanie Görtz