BERLIN — The voice of the female filmmaker was louder than ever at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, with seven out of the 16 films…
BERLIN — The voice of the female filmmaker was louder than ever at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, with seven out of the 16 films in the competition section helmed by women, and female directors from all corners of the globe featured prominently.
Women directors represented 63 percent of the films presented across the festival’s 15 different sections, making it the biggest representation of women directors in the festival’s 69-year history. In addition, the Berlin Film Festival’s selection committee was overwhelmingly female.
There were originally 17 films in competition but one film from China was withdrawn.
This year’s festival, also known as the Berlinale, wraps up on Sunday. It has been rich with global women telling female-focused stories, including Michela Occhipinti’s feature debut “Flesh Out,” about the practice of gavage, the forced fattening-up of young girls before their weddings in Western Africa.
“We are half, maybe more than half the population,” she said of women. “(We are) feeling something different.”
Other female-centered stories included Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska and her feminist satire “God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya,” ”37 Seconds,” a tender story from Japan about sex and disability from Hikari; and Austrian filmmaker Marie Kreutzer’s “The Ground Beneath My Feet,” which looks at a high-performing career woman struggling with a sister with mental illness.
There was also the black-and-white lesbian love drama “Elisa and Marcela” from Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet.
British director Joanna Hogg presented her fourth feature film, “The Souvenir,” which followed a young girl through film school in the 1980s. Part autobiographical, part fiction, “The Souvenir” stars Honor Swinton Byrne as a student filmmaker alongside her mother, Tilda Swinton, who plays her on-screen mom.
Hogg says she wants to encourage more women to make films and explains that one of the reasons for making the movie was to show a woman as an artist.
