BRATTLEBORO — Two weekends ago, I visited a women's prison in Afghanistan. I also spent some time listening to a stunning Lebanese writer defend her erotic Arabic-language magazine, which is sold by subscription all over the Arab world.
I also watched three very brave women confront government oppression and censorship in three very different societies. And I went to Tennessee to learn about the wonders of childbirth from a midwife who is internationally revered.
All this and more - and I hardly ever left my couch.
As a journalist who has almost never had to fight against censorship and oppression, one of the jobs I like most is writing these preview stories for the Women's Film Festival, now in its 23rd year.
I enjoy taking the opportunity to learn about other women, other cultures, other struggles, and other triumphs. The festival, put on as a fundraiser by the Women's Freedom Center, opens with a gala on Friday, March 7 at the New England Youth Theatre. It runs all that weekend and all the next, too.
This year, the festival sits comfortably at the crossroads of travelogue and agitprop. There's no generic theme except “by women about women for women,” although one of the most amazing films this year is by an Iranian-Swedish man. No costumes, no singing, no choreography, no glitz. Just a large amount of courage, heartache, and drama, more than enough injustice to make your blood boil, and a few laughs along the way.
The selection committee viewed more than 150 films to choose the 31 that make up the festival.
“We look for every and any movie out there that has been made by, and is about, women,” said Vickie Sterling, the executive director of the Women's Freedom Center. “We're generally looking for new or newer films. Once we get down to a list of possibilities based on quality, we go through them with an eye toward variety.”
“We don't want there to be any one theme. We're striving for balance. This year - and most years - since female directors are better represented in documentaries, the strongest films were documentaries. We'd like to get more feature films in the lineup, but not at the price of quality.”
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One of the more remarkable films is No Burqas Behind Bars, the 2012 film shot in the women's section of Afghanistan's Takhar Prison by Nima Sarvestani.
Even though the Taliban is no longer in complete control of Afghanistan, even though the country ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 2003, even though it passed a law criminalizing all forms of violence against women in 2009, and on and on and on, the reality is that tribal law rules and women are pieces of property.
The U.S. has spent tens of billions of dollars in Afghanistan since 2002, and it makes me very angry to know about daily injustices against women in a country that is practically lighting its cooking fires with my tax dollars.
The prison has segregated quarters for 500 male and 40 female inmates - and, in the women's quarter, for many children as well. (Some of these children are born in prison. One woman says, “The night my son was born, all the women danced.”)
We learn that most of the women are imprisoned for running away from home. That means they are running from abusive husbands, or they are running from families that are forcing them into marriages they don't want.
One woman's husband comes to visit her at the prison just to beat her some more; he tells her that he will kill her and chop her into pieces when she is released.
Because they flee their oppressive homes, their sentences can range anywhere from four to 12 years. The only murderess we meet is serving six years, which shows you the priorities of the culture. You have to wonder at the insecurities of the men that they place disobedience to themselves over murder.
Inside the prison, the women cover their hair with shawls - they also cover their mouths with them when they laugh - but they don't have to wear burqas. Only when they leave the confines of their compound do they have to cover themselves completely.
Inside the compound, they share four large rooms, buy and cook their own food, deal with one another's craziness, and create small, all-female communities in which they feel safe. The male officials who run the prison seem very caring, helpful, and protective.
There is even a sort of cockeyed love story running through this documentary. One woman is in Takhar because she ran away with her lover. He is next door in the men's prison. They write to each other every day, and children smuggle the notes back and forth. He sends his laundry for her to wash. She hopes they will marry once they are free.
They are released on the same day. He jumps into a car with his family and drives away, leaving her in the dirt. She ends up alone and living in a woman's shelter.
How Sarvestani got permission to make this film must be a story in itself, and also how he got the women to trust him enough to let him film their lives. What he finds in Takhar is fascinating. But in a culture where once women went to college with men and had careers of their own, this reversion to tribal customs is more than a little depressing.
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If No Burqas Behind Bars shows us gender repression, then Forbidden Voices: How to Start a Revolution With a Laptop, a remarkable 2012 Swiss film by Barbara Miller, shows us the realities of political oppression.
Here, world-famous female bloggers Yoani Sánchez of Cuba, Zeng Jinyan of China, and Farnaz Seifi of Iran courageously confront oppressive regimes and willingly pay the price. Sánchez is beaten, Zeng is put under house arrest and her husband is sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison, and Seifi flees Iran to live as an exile in Europe, where she works with Reporters Without Borders and longs to go home.
These brave rebels have successes as well as failures, and my heart was in my mouth for their safety as I followed their careers in this closely detailed and inspiring documentary.
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A film I hated with a passion but was riveted by is A Girl and a Gun, a 2012 documentary by Cathryne Czubek about American women and their weapons.
To give her credit, Czubek doesn't take sides or play politics in the gun debate - instead, she humanizes all the sides. Women who love their guns as well as women who hate the idea of gun proliferation in America have a chance to tell their stories. They're all convincing, especially the one woman who actually defended herself and her child by shooting and killing an intruder.
The underlying thesis here of gun ownership, however, is fallacious. Female gun ownership is presented as being a liberating, feminist choice - i.e., guns stand for everything powerful and masculine in our society, so women are breaking down gender barriers by embracing gun culture.
We have seen this argument before, i.e. the workplace is for men, so by becoming bankers, attorneys, doctors, professors, etc., women are breaking boundaries and it's all good. Then we find out that women can be as dominating, greedy, cruel, and dumb as men, and all we've done is double the number of horrible people with power in the world.
So don't show me pink rifles and pink revolvers and pink camouflage crotchless panties (yes, really) and tell me I'm gaining power. This is just another consumer shuck, but one that uses fear as a marketing ploy.
I swear to God, the best line in the film is, “Nobody ever raped Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Wesson.” And it appears that a lot of women are falling for it.
I've shot guns, and I know the sense of power they can give you, which is why I, personally, am unalterably opposed to them (except when they are part of the job, as they are for farmers and soldiers).
This is one of the most disturbing films I've seen in a long time, so I recommend that you see it for yourself and then get into an argument with somebody.
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The film I loved, loved, loved the most this year is Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and the Farm Midwives, a 2012 documentary about Ur-midwife Ina May Gaskin by Sara Lamm and Mary Wigmore. In it you will joyously see many babies being born and hear many marvelous women talk about their birthing experiences.
Gaskin's first child, back in the Dark Ages of women's medicine, was a forceps delivery for “pre-emptive purposes.” That means that for no good medical reason, a two-pronged metal instrument was inserted into her vagina while she was in labor and wrapped around the baby's head to pull it out.
She decided there must be a better way, and she went on to almost singlehandedly revive the art of midwifery and natural childbirth in America.
When she started, Gaskin was fighting an all-male medical establishment that considered pregnancy to be something of a disease. What a surprise to find that after delivering about 1,200 babies naturally, she now finds herself fighting a culture that fears pain and wants Cesarian sections (one out of every three births in America today!) instead of the experience of childbirth - or, in the world of upperclass women, surrogate births so that they never have to lose their expensive figures.
Now in her early 70s, Gaskin - her husband is Stephen Gaskin, founder and for many years the guru of The Farm, an ongoing hippie commune with more than 100 members in the woods of Tennessee - has written several books on childbirth, including her 1975 Spiritual Midwifery, which is now in its fourth edition and has been translated into many languages.
Midwifery is still controversial, yet Gaskin travels the world giving lectures and inspiring women. In this film she inspired me.
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Other films for your consideration include The Mosuo Sisters, a lyrical 2012 film by Marlo Poras about two young sisters from a little-known matriarchal culture in China and how they relate to each other, their family, and the wider, modern world that is today's China.
And Jasad and the Queen of Contradictions, a 2011 film by Amanda Homsi-Ottosson which tells the story of the glamourous Lebanese poet and writer Joumana Haddad and her erotic magazine, Jasad, which tackles head-on the topic of the body and sexuality in an Arab culture most of us think of as wrapped in burqas.
Which brings me back to burqas, where I started.
I'll end with a reminder to check the website for the schedule, go to the gala dressed as your favorite superheroine/hero, and see some - or all - of the films.