10th International Filmmor Women's Film Festival March 10–18, 2012

İstanbul Modern Cinema hosts the 10th International Filmmor Women’s Film Festival on Wheels. Held between March 10-18 the festival brings together this year films from the history of feminist cinema and marvelous films from previous Filmmor festivals. Starting with Alice Guy-Blaché, who shot the first narrative film in the history of world cinema, a total of 35 films, both short and feature-length, by pioneering directors of film history will be screened at İstanbul Modern.

Panel: 100 Years of Feminist Cinema
Participants: Alin Taşçıyan, Hülya Uğur Tanrıöver, Kay Armatage, Marie Mandy, Necla Algan
Date: 10.03.2012, 17:00

THE HOUSE IS BLACK (HANEYE SEYAH EST), 1962
Iran | 16mm, Black-White, 20’ | Persian
Director: Furuğ Ferruhzad
Set in a leper colony in the north of Iran, the documentary The House is Black juxtaposes "ugliness," of which there is much in the world as stated in the opening scenes, with religion and gratitude.

OUR TIMES (RUZ-EGAR-E MA), 2002
Iran | 35mm, Color, 105’ | Persian
Director: Rahşan Bani-Etemad
Bani-Etemad's film focuses on the Iranian elections of 2002 and the role of women in Iranian society. The filmmaker follows a group of women who run for office and gradually narrows her view to the plight of one woman who attempts a heroic but unsuccessful run for the presidency.

70-80-90, INNOCENT, INSOLENT, ENTICING
(70-80-90, MASUM, KÜSTAH, FETTAN), 2010
Türkiye | DV, Color, 65’ | Turkish
Director: Melek Özman
Women in Turkish cinema are rarely narrators and mostly subject in films directed mostly by men. They are Innocent, Insolent or Enticing, but always two-dimensional: either "good" or "bad". But how real is their goodness or malignity? Why are they never taken seriously, be trusted or never forgiven but always punished? In the film, we follow Alin Taşçıyan, Arzu Okay, Hülya Uğur Tanrıöver, Lale Belkis, Agah Özgüç, Ülkü Erakalın and the audience to see how Yeşilçam films treat women. 

SISTERS, LEARN TO DOUBT FIRST! THE IDEAS AND ACTIVITIES OF KIKUE YAMAKAWA
(YAMAKAWA KIKUE NO SHISOU TO KATSUDOU,
"SHIMAIYO, MAZU KAKUUTAGAUKOTO WO NARAE!"), 2011
Japan | DV, Color, 76’ | Japanese
Director: Chieko Yamagami
In Japan, during the Meiji Taisho period when a modern state based on capitalist economy was built, patriarchy supresses women and complicates their lives at home and at work. 
Living in this period, Kiku Yamakawa claimed that gender equality could solve all the labor problems and that the rights of all people could be protected. She thus created her own socialist feminist theory. The documentary focuses on the life and times of Kiku Yamakawa while questioning the issues on gender equality and human rights both in Japan and all over the world today.

BODIES WITHOUT SOULS (BEDENSİZ RUHLAR), 2011
Türkiye | HDCam, Color, 60’ | Turkish
Director: Sabite Kaya
Through the story of Ayşe Tükrükçü, a former sex worker who had been a candidate in the parliamentary elections in 2007, the film tells the story of women forced to prostitution, their fight  to escape this industry as well as their struggle to survive despite familial and economic problems.

TUZ, SU, UN (WATER, SALT, FLOUR), 2011
Türkiye, Argentina | DV, Color, 40’ | Spanish
Director: Bettina Frese
In the political atmosphere of the 90s in Argentina, pikete, by which a  group of people blocks a road, appeared as a form of demonstration for large groups of people and began to be associated with the movement of piketeros, generally composed of unemployed people. Piketeros are represented in the mainstream media as violent men with masks and clubs in their hands.The film is about the women who are never mentioned in this dominant movement although they make 70% of it.

THE TRACE (SAMA), 1988
Tunus, Belçika, Almanya  | 16mm, Renkli, 90’ | Arapça
Yönetmen: Néjia Ben Mabrouk
Sabra lives in a poor industrial town in the south of Tunisia and tries to escape the constraints of traditional family life. It is a culture she loves but finds suffocating, for it shuts women away. The film reveals the male-dominated culture in Tunisia through sections from Sabra’s life by mixing present and past through flashbacks. 

A FEW BRAVE PEOPLE (BİR AVUÇ CESUR İNSAN), 2011
Türkiye | DigiBeta, Color, 87’ | Turkish
Director: Rüya Arzu Köksal
The people of Çağlayan, İkizdere and Senoz -three valleys in the Black Sea region- are at a loss about what to do with the government’s plans to build dozens of hydroelectric plants in their valleys. They cannot make sense of the fact that their rivers -a lifeline, teacher and inspiration- are to be rented out to private companies to exploit for the next 49 years. The authorities tell them that this is a must, necessary for Turkey’s development and energy independence. Then, they sign the rivers off, and immediately begin construction in Şenöz. Trees are cut off, massive water pipes are laid, and as the river goes quiet, it is as if the locals in Şenöz slowly begin to expire. In İkizdere, there are those who believe the dams will mean more employment, and then, there are those who are determined to resist this brutal intervention to their lives. Aware of what happened in Şenöz and İkizdere, people in Çağlayan begin a determined campaign against the state and its corporations. 

SHOOTING WOMEN, 2008
USA | DigiBeta, Color, 54’ | English
Director: Alexis Krasilovsky
Featuring more than 50 camerawomen from around the world, and shot over a period of six years, Shooting Women, by pioneering filmmaker and cinema studies professor Alexis Krasilovsky, celebrates the amazing talent and unflinching spirit of image-making women from the sets of Hollywood and Bollywood to the war zones of Afghanistan. This internationally-acclaimed documentary, based on Krasilovsky’s book “Women Behind the Camera,” broaches the persistent issues of the glass ceiling, sexual harassment, and childcare for professional camerawomen around the globe—working from environments where raising such issues is seen as “unprofessional.”  

SEETTLEMENT (SULHNAME), 2011
Türkiye | HDV, Color, 79’ | Turkish
Director: Şehbal Şenyurt
Settlement examines the implementation of Compensation Law no.5233 for the compensation of lost and damages caused by the forced migration and evacuation of villages in Van during the State of Emergency period.

GRANDMA'S TATTOOS, 2011
Sweden | Digibeta, Color, 58’ | Swedish, English
Director: Suzanne Khardalian
“My grandmother was a bit strange. Nobody loved her, she never hugged. The blue tattoos on his face and on her hands were horrifying. Tattoos that seemed like satanic signs coming from a dark world were appalling. What was wrong with my grandmother, why was she so strange? Who made these tattoos? But it was wrong to ask these questions. It was forbidden to talk about grandmother.”  
To explore the story of her grandmother Khanoum’s strange tattoos, the director makes a journey in the history of her own family. In this journey that goes back to 1915, she pursues a story previously untold about war, deportation, sexual violence and about what women endured.

t in limbo.