Panorama

Panorama

THE BARE ESSENCE OF LIFE

With around 40 films from 20 countries, Panorama offers a focused look at the work of women film-makers from all corners of the globe. The aim of showing a representative cross-section of women’s recent films at a festival held in 2010 is thus satisfactorily met – and not just partly. As with most festivals, the Dortmund | Cologne International Women’s Film Festival is registering a steady increase in entries that ultimately reflect the rising number of films directed by women worldwide. Though we make no claim to completeness, visitors to this year’s festival can expect a truly up-to-date selection of outstanding productions.
In the case of the Panorama, we are particularly interested in individual approaches remarkable for unusual perspectives and the joy of stylistic experimentation. The outcome is twofold: young women directors, proudly presenting their first films at the festival and old acquaintances whose careers we have accompanied over the years. Andrea Arnold, for instance, who won the 2007 Director’s Award in Dortmund, and who this year is showing her latest movie Fish Tank. In this coming-of-age story, she returns to the British underclass as her subject, taking a deeply humanist view of her protagonists battered by life as they are. Indeed, Panorama has always had a great affinity for these weird but likable figures – like those, as in the Japanese feature film The Bare Essence of Life, who spray themselves with insecticide in the belief that they might get closer to their dreams and the love of their life.
The need to capture and recreate that bare essence of life is the common thread in this year’s selection. Whether it is a broad-based political issue such as migration in Les arrivants (The Arrivals), a film which, with great care and affection, reflects the everyday tribulations of migrants and local government workers alike and which was deservedly awarded the Golden Dove at DOK, the international documentary film festival based in Leipzig, Germany. Orwhether it is a radical take on personal stories such as Claire Pijman’s courageous film about her mother, whose old age she and her family had wanted so much to lend dignity to, and about the setbacks they face – shown here with moving honesty.
Traditionally speaking, Panorama has been committed to the documentary form if only because women directors are more active in this field than that of full-length fiction features. That being so, it is a privilege to get a glimpse into worlds that would otherwise remain closed: into the fate of the people in the hermetically sealed dictatorship of North Korea in Kimjongilia, for example, or into the everyday life of a young working mother in Damascus trying to balance her own wishes against the demands of the family. Dolls – A Woman from Damascus plays anew the card of the female beauty ideal – via Fulla, the Arab version of the Barbie doll, who is also held up as a role model. And behind Fulla’s smile is a marketing manager busily fine-tuning and profit-maximising the image of a modern Arab woman. Meanwhile, western ideals of beauty occupy Adoma Owusu whose My White Baby subversively shows Ghanaian women hairdressers practicing their skills on white baby dolls.
It’s still around, then: a decidedly feminist approach. Yet that is only one aspect of the film creativity kit available to women film-makers. Not all women directors gravitate to main female roles. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno is the documentary of a legendary attempt to make a film that dares to go further than others do … and failed spectacularly. A parable, perhaps, of film-making per se and the bare essence of life: human, dignified, committed and unmissable.

_Betty Schiel