I spent the past five days experiencing as much of the 24th annual Women in the Director’s Chair (WIDC) film festival as I could. And it was a great time!

WIDC’s is the largest and longest running international women’s film and video festival in the US. It brings together a terrific selection of media made by women, girls, and transgendered people to promote grassroots and independent film, video, and other media that challenges just about every image we see in the mainstream.

As they put it on their website, “We seek to encourage the development of strategies of resistance that combat inaccuracy with truth, and replace perpetual disenfranchisement with community.” I walked out of the final screening last night and rode the EL home reconsidering every image of women, girls, transgendered, and disabled people I have learned.

The talk of the festival was the premiere of Miranda July’s “Me And You and Everyone We Know,” which is set for theatrical release this summer, and the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration screening of the feminist classic (and still unforgivingly moving) “A Jury of Her Peers” by Sally Heckel. At least one woman maker next to me called July a “F—ing Genius.” And, the packed house for Sally Heckel’s screening almost didn’t let her end the Q&A session.

My personal favorite of all I saw was Jackie Goss’s “How to Fix the World”—a quirky experimental documentary about the outcomes of Soviet literacy programs in the 1920s. The thirty-minute film is a great look at cultural imperialism and the unavoidable violence of even the best-meaning educational programs. Anybody working in a literacy program or involved in ethnographic research should watch this film.

The entire “Body Politics” program deserves special attention. “Botox,” “In the Folds,” “The Kids are Alright,” “Belle,” and “Beyond Disability: The Fe Fe Stories” are five films that focus on the fact that we all live in our bodies—for better and worse—and that folks who’ve been oppressed in the past are now shouting out, “Piss on Pity!” The more we hear from these voices, the better.

Especially good too were some of the video installations around the site. “Lightwave” by Phyllis Bulkin Lehrer, “La Specola” by Caitlin Berrigan, and Michelle Dizon’s “Departement des Arts de l’Islam, Salle 1, Objets d’Irak”—on the destruction of Iraqi art objects when US troops arrived, stood out.

The festival also included a panel on the current state of women’s film festivals and women’s independent filmmaking. The panel raised some familiar and some new questions. What is the future of women’s/girl’s/trans media in the current climate? What can they do to continue to bring makers and viewers together? What can we all do to hang onto these festivals with broad focuses and wide aims of speaking out against images that do more harm than good?

If you missed it this weekend, don’t fret. WIDC travels with a selection from the festival and has an archive available at least to residents of Chicago. For more information and a partial listing of other women’s film festivals, check out their website.

Brian Bergen-Aurand, Sex and Gender Editor

This entry was posted on Monday, March 21st, 2005 at 2:26 pm by chillun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.