FEMALE FILMMAKERS AT OPEN CITY DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL
Press Release by Huda Awan
Posted by Iliana Cosme-Brooks
Retrospectives
Celebrate the Art of Nonfiction at Open City Documentary Film Festival 11th edition, which runs across London cinemas and venues 8-14 September, and features 3 UK first retrospectives of the works of female filmmakers Alia Syed, Renate Sami, and Haneda Sumiko.
Alia Syed’s work investigates the nature and role of language in intercultural communication, with a focus on borders and boundaries, translation and the trans-cultured self. Syed’s films draw from personal and historical realities in order to address the subjective relationship to gender, location, diaspora and colonialism.
Renate Sami (Berlin, 1935) is a filmmaker and translator whose work resists narrow categorisations. Her films are extremely diverse in form and content, oscillating between the poetic, the observational and the political. Sami was moved into becoming a filmmaker aged forty following the death of Holger Meins, the subject of her first film.
Haneda Sumiko is one of the most prominent documentary filmmakers from Japan and one of the few women working in non-fiction cinema there in the postwar period. Born in 1926, in Dalian, China (then Manchuria, under Japanese occupation), in 1949 Haneda entered Iwanami Productions, a company producing educational and promotional films, where she would make films about the arts, education, and nature.
Films
This year The Open City Documentary Film Festival is screening three films that grapple with the female experience in creative and thought-provoking ways.
Shady River (dir. Tatiana Mazú González) is a complexly layered essay film that deconstructs a mine in the Argentinian Patagonia as a gendered territory and gives a voice to the untold stories of women living in towns of men.
Delphine’s Prayers (dir. Rosine Mbakam) is the latest film by acclaimed filmmaker Rosine Mbakam, and a portrait of Delphine, a young Cameroonian woman now living in Belgium. Over the course of several interview sessions, Delphine describes a life full of tragedy, trauma and loss.
All Other Things Equal (dir. Anya Tsyrlina) is a found footage documentary in which material taken from late-Soviet propaganda films about gender equality is reconstructed to imagine a world populated entirely by women. The film depicts women performing an increasingly broad range of roles from the mundane to the extraordinary. Explore their full programme at opencitylondon.com
To learn more about the festival and its other films, you can visit its website, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Connect with Huda by visiting their profile.