BRATTLEBORO — A luminous 90-year-old Broadway star who will make you feel happy that you're alive. A graceful group of dedicated teenage ballet dancers who are determined to succeed professionally.
An uneducated Corsican cleaning woman who turns herself into a chess master. A lovely Dutch teenage girl who is unafraid to tell people she's really a boy.
An acclaimed African-American painter who is “saddled” with the care of her mentally disabled sister after their mother dies but who leaves you wondering who really has the better life. A minister who says religion is not about belief but about having “the heart open for love and delight.”
March is Women's History Month, so it's also time for the 21st Annual Women's Film Festival, a fundraiser for the Women's Freedom Center. This year, the festival runs from March 9 to March 18, with showings at both the Latchis Theatre and the New England Youth Theatre.
It's 2012, and you would think women have come a long-enough way, baby, to not need a month or a film festival. But baby, would you be wrong!
Underneath all the Hollywood teen-age boy blow-'em-up films starring robots, action figures, writhing leather-clad females, and costumed superheroes, there is a serious longing for films made by and for adults, films that give us the experiences and perspectives of the other half of the world.
Not to mention that a certain segment of our population is intent on pushing back all the freedoms and equalities won by women, gays and lesbians, transgendered persons, African-Americans, and just about every other formerly marginalized group.
That is one of the things that makes the documentary Raw Faith so interesting. In this film, the story of the remarkable Dr. Marilyn Sewall, the former pastor of the First Unitarian Church in Portland, Ore., we follow her as she wrestles honestly with her cruel upbringing, the love of her work, her loneliness, her retirement after 17 glorious and successful years as a minister, and also - an unexpected benefit - as she finds love for the first time.
“Most evil is done in the name of some greater good,” Sewall says in a sermon about fundamentalism. “The problem with any fundamentalist stance is that it puts goodness in a box and wraps it up. The way can no longer be questioned.”
“Some people are in,” Sewall says. “Others are out. We are good. They are bad. When we place ourselves above people and judge them as 'other,' we tear out a part of our human heart.”
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This year, the festival will show 27 films that enrich our human hearts, chosen from a remarkable 125 submitted during the year. It's a tribute to the festival - the longest-running one in New England and one of the most prestigious in the nation - that so many films are submitted each year.
And since members of the all-volunteer Film Selection Committee, led by Merry Elder, spend up to 15 hours a week, from August to early December, looking at films, they deserve a hearty round of applause for their dedication, discernment, and passion.
Responding to feedback, this year the festival is showing more narrative films, but documentaries about women of achievement - among them Nobel laureate and Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and revered primate biologist Jane Goodall - are still a big part of the mix, as are social issues.
There are also a hefty number of foreign-language films and, for some reason, quite a few come from Holland, whose strong film industry is one to be admired.
Although Dori Berinstein's Carol Channing: Larger Than Life, which opens the festival, is playing right now in New York to fabulous reviews, most of these films would not been available at the multiplex - if Brattleboro even still had one.
The Channing film makes a perfect opening film because the Broadway legend (whose career included roles in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Hello, Dolly!) is not only charming, gifted, flamboyant, and beloved, even in her 90s, but because during the filming she was living the love story to end all love stories.
After a bad 42-year marriage, Channing finally reconnected with her junior high school sweetheart, Harry Kullijian, and married him in 2003. The film, which will warm your heart, was completed just before his death in December.
“What you come away with is a sense of Channing as someone who really was larger than life, even before she'd adopted the signature look of blonde puffball wig, enormous false eyelashes over mammoth kewpie-doll eyes, and that great smiling mouth, highlighted with luminescent shades of red and pink,” wrote film critic Marshall Fine. “She had a quick wit, a startling gift for mimicry as a raconteur, and a gameness to do just about anything for a laugh.”
So right away, the rap on “women's films” - that they revel in victimization - is blown out of the water.
And anyone who still thinks like that should watch Sex Crimes Unit, a documentary about the dedicated district attorneys in New York City's sex crimes unit, the real-world Law & Order: SVU.
In the film, we also get to meet two brave and strong rape “victims,” one a prostitute, who both manage, even after years, to confront their attackers and put them in jail.
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Every year, at least one or two of the films blindside members of the audience with their power and beauty. There is always a unique aura of discovery about this festival that makes it quite unlike any other.
The Channing film may be one of them this year. Another might be Queen to Play, Caroline Bottaro's 2009 chess drama set in the gorgeous countryside of Corsica. Or Ben Sombogaart's 2008 sweeping romantic drama Bride Flight.
Bride Flight has been called one of the most expensive Dutch films ever made. It takes place just after World War II and tells the story of three young women who throw caution to the winds and emigrate to New Zealand to find new and better lives.
“A film like Bride Flight works because we want to see it unfolding,” said film critic Roger Ebert. “We observe the pieces going into place and want to see how it will all work out. That it works out more or less inevitably is to be expected, I suppose, but you'd be upset if I revealed some of the twists and turns.”
This spellbinding film is as sensual and sexy as it is deeply revealing about the emotional lives of the three women - and the man they all loved at one time or another.
One of the most delightful films is another Dutch documentary, a 15-minute short by Susan Koenen called I Am a Girl. In it we meet Joppe, an enchanting, lively, lovely, long-haired 13-year-old girl who revels in gossip, nail polish, clothing, boys, and her giggling friends. But in actuality, physically, she is a boy.
The Dutch are far ahead of America in their acceptance of people like Joppe because, once her parents figured out that she is a girl in a boy's body, they joined forces with her school to help with her transition. She now takes medication to keep from going through puberty as a boy; when the time comes, she will have gender realignment surgery.
In the meantime, she is a typical teenage girl who fearlessly tells her new classmates the truth about her journey because “they'll find out sooner or later anyway, so they might as well hear about it from me.”
Wish Me Away is a different kind of a coming-out documentary, and it's hard to know how to feel about it.
Made in 2011 by Bobbie Birleffi and Beverly Kopf, it tells the story of Chely Wright, a very pretty country music star (Single White Female and Shut Up and Drive are two of her hits) who decides, in 2010, at the age of 40, to come out as a lesbian. (It's a word that she has a hard time saying, by the way; she uses the word “gay” as an odd kind of euphemism instead.)
While coming out is never easy, most people who do it don't have a makeup artist, a manager, an agent, a book editor, Meredith Viera, and Oprah Winfrey in their corner. Wright comes across as a bit narcissistic and self-pitying, but those are the spines of most country music narratives anyway.
In her quest to remain a country music star beloved by her fans, Wright managed to hurt quite a few people, which might make her appear less than likable. For example, she breaks the heart of country music star Brad Paisley, with whom she tries to have a heterosexual relationship, as well as her longtime female partner, whom she deserts when she panics that her secret will be discovered. Remorse does not appear to be in her character.
However, since homosexuality appears to be a mortal sin to the majority of country music fans, Wright's fears were fully realized: coming out trashed her career.
She's made a new career as a gay rights activist, but does that mean she's just found a different audience to adore her? See the movie and decide for yourself.
In Stephen Ascher and Jeanne Jordan's 2011 documentary Raising Renee, the gifted African-American painter Beverly McIver takes on the responsibility for her mentally disabled older sister, Renee, after their mother dies.
In the middle of a brilliant career, McIver has to leave New York for a South she holds in contempt to take over the difficult role of caretaker, while teaching and making glorious pictures every step of her way. During six years of filming, she talks to the camera with disarming honesty, revealing the sometimes-uncomfortable feelings she has about her sister and her new role.
The film gives viewers a lot to think about: career over family, the injustice of having to put aside your own dreams to care for another, the solitary life of the artist over the community, the rewards over the losses of a fully lived life.
The documentary TutuMuch follows nine little girls between the ages of 9 and 12 who are spending four weeks at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's summer school. Their goal is to progress as ballerinas and possibly be accepted into the company's full-year school program.
For the girls, success means being born with the right kind of body, hard work, and leaving home. For their parents, besides letting go, it means facing the high cost of school and board and living the dream.
But for the four weeks of the program, the girls dance and dance, make great friends, suffer for their art, provide the viewer with an endless stream of enchanting visual images and, in general, have a marvelous time.
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These are just a few of the 27 films - the joy they give and the questions they engender.
And the best part?
The film selection committee is already starting to screen films for the 22nd Annual Festival in 2013.