A Noble Film Festival
In a world filled with preconceived notions about what should be, we scholars must often go in search of a way around these entrenched ideas. Perhaps even better is to plunge straight through them and show them for what they really are. That way, our view of the world can shatter the view we may have once had.
It’s a big task. Do we simply become brilliant with one walk of life, or do we walk out and meet the behemoth that is understanding the world, and become better people?
You damn well go out and tackle the world’s issues. And what better way to get your foot out the door than to attend the already running Ninth International Women’s Film Festival offered by the UB Gender Institute?
The Festival began on January 27 and has brought us three nights of films so far, with three more left to go. The series isn’t just the work of a few people who want to let you know what it is like to be a woman in the world. It is a community project co-sponsored by over 25 University at Buffalo departments, other university units, and multiple community collaborators.
This year, the series features distinguished, award-winning films depicting women’s lives and perspectives from France, Belgium, Georgia, Turkey, Senegal, Hungary, the Ukraine, Pakistan, India, Iran, and the United States. Each film considers a multitude of issues, including memory, trauma, and re-creation. There are also questions of gender, which combine individual and generational tensions regarding religious and cultural philosophy in the midst of major historical events such as the partition of Pakistan, the Cold War, the American anti-Vietnam War movement, and the dissolution of the former Soviet Union.
Each of the six films are introduced and followed by discussions with film experts from within and outside UB.
The three nights that have already passed contained the films Depuis Qu’Otar Est Parti…(Since Otar Left…), Moolaadé, and a night of shorts, including Devotion, It’s not my Memory of it: Three Recollected Documents, and a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert.
The three films that you can see still get out and see are:
Divan (Thursday, February 17, at a showing in which the film’s director Pearl Gluck will be in attendance) is the story of how, as a teenager, filmmaker Gluck and her mother left their Orthodox Jewish clan in Brooklyn for secular life in Manhattan after her parents’ divorce. Many years later, Pearl’s father has one wish: that she marry and return to the community. Pearl, however, takes a more creative approach to mend the breach. She travels to Hungary to retrieve a family heirloom: a couch upon which esteemed rabbis once slept. Nimbly clever and intensely illuminating, Divan is a visual parable that offers the possibility of personal reinvention and cultural re-upholstery.
Khamoshi Pani (Silent Waters), playing February 24, is set in a rural Pakistani village in 1979, at a time when the newly formed military government of General Zia allowed the country to swing towards Islamic fundamentalism. The film follows Ayesha, a progressive-thinking Muslim widow who lives with her adored teenage son, Saleem. The two of them get by on the money Ayesha earns as a seamstress and teaching the Koran to children. At loose ends, Saleem easily falls under the sway of the Islamic extremists who come to town to recruit young men for Jihad. It’s not the first time the village has been terrorized by religious extremists. For Ayesha, it is as if she is being forced to relive the horror of the 1947 partitioning of India and Pakistan—a horror that, as the film reveals, continues to reverberate today. This film is a passionate feminist tragedy.
Beest Angosht (Fingers), playing March 3, has seven segments in which a man and a woman talk about intimate things. Discussed are the need for an official virginity check on the woman before marriage, “disciplinary forces” who arrest a couple suspected of adultery, abortion, and lesbianism. The couple reflects the roots of dependencies, limitations, power struggles, and conflicts that are the familiar stuff of life and love in Iran.
So make sure you head down to the Market Arcade Cinema this Thursday night to see Divan and the other films the following two weeks. And I mean this for both sexes: this is a chance to see how the world is different outside our borders, and perhaps a chance for you to realize how good we have it here, and that for the world to be a better place, we must understand it. Don’t miss the chance, they don’t come very often these days.
Films are shown at 7 p.m. on Thursdays at the Market Arcade Film and Arts Centre (639 Main St.). UB Students can get in for $6 with ID. Go to http://www.womenandgender.buffalo.edu/ for further information.
