8th International Filmmor Women’s Film Festival March 14–20, 2010

İstanbul Modern Cinema is hosting the eighth International Filmmor Women’s Film Festival on Wheels. The tagline for this year’s festival, which will be held between 14-20 March, is “Women Is Our Hope!” With a total of 23 films both short and feature-length, the festival will present widely different stories of women from all corners of the world, gathering hope from despair. With their thoughts, feelings, experiences, dreams, and hopes, once more women play the leading role!

OUR CITY DREAMS
USA, 2009, DVCam, Color, 84’, English, French, English Subtitled
Director: Chiara Clemente
Five women, five different cultures… Nancy Spero is in the feminist movement since the 1950s and goes on questioning sexual identity. Marina Abramovich does performances by using her own body and points at nowadays cultural issues. Kiki Smith reflects through her works the relation of philosophical, social and spiritual conditions with human body. Ghada Amer refuses the oppressive and institutionalized approaches. And Swoon, who combines street art with the city life pulse. The film focuses on the way these women coming from different cultures touch and dream their new home-city.

A QUESTION OF SILENCE
Netherlands,1982, 35 mm, Color, English
Director: Marlen Gorris
Three women who don’t know each other encounter in a boutique. One of them steals an item of clothing but gets caught by the owner of the shop. The other two women intervene and they three end up by beating the owner to death. The other shopping women ignore the case and leave the boutique while the crime is being committed. A woman psychiatrist is appointed by the court to examine these women’s case. Contrary to the general opinion, the psychiatrist claims that the women are not insane and that the crime is the result of a male-dominated society.

BROKEN MIRRORS
Netherlands, 1984, 35 mm, Color, 108’, Dutch, English Subtitled
Director: Marlen Gorris
Diane and Dora work in a whore house in Amsterdam and are in rebellion against their life. They come across Bea, who was kidnapped and confined by one of the customer of the whore house. A radical feminist story about the tough life of sex worker women and men violence...

MRS. DALLOWAY
England/USA/Netherlands, 1997, DV, Color, 97’, English
Director: Eileen Atkins, adapted from a novel by Virginia Woolf
“...She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more...” The film, adapted from the novel of the same name by Virginia Woolf, tells one day of Clarissa Dalloway in the England after World War I. When doing final preparations for a home party she will give, a man she loved with great passion 30 years ago appears at the door. While with him, Clarissa remembers her passion and her choices but goes on fulfilling the requirements of being Mrs. Dalloway.

ANTONIA'S LINE
Netherlands, Belgium, England, 1995, 35 mm, Color, 102’ / 95’, Dutch, English Subtitled
Director: Willy Stassen
Antonia lives with her daughter and grandchildren in a farm house. One day, she wakes up and realizes that this is going to be the last day of her life. Through flashbacks, she begins to tell her story, from the day on when, after the Second World War, she settled in the family farm with her daughter Danielle. So many things happened in the past fifty years.....Danielle, who is a painter, decided to have a baby without getting married. Antonia found a suitable donor for her daughter and Danielle gave birth to her daughter Therese. And so did Therese to Sarah. Through three generations of women, the film is at life and death borderline about violence, fidelity, courage, independence and freedom. An example of feminist cinema that has to be seen, again and again....

CAN GO THROUGH SKIN
Netherlands, 2009, 35 mm, Color, 97’, Dutch, English Subtitled
Director: Esther Rots
After a sexual assault, Mariekes leaves her city and retreats in an isolated village to live in a dilapidated farm house. With fear, anxiety and worry…

TIE A YELLOW RIBBON
USA, 2007, HDCam, Color, 83’, English
Director: Joy Dietrich
Jenny is a Korean girl adopted by a family from New-York. She works in a cafe but dreams of being a photographer. The film examines how Jenny and Asian women living in America face the discrimination they bear, their hope and their despair…

QUEER SARAJEVO FESTIVAL
Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2009, DVCam, Color, 33’, Bosnian, English Subtitled
Directors: Masa Hilcisin, Cazim Dervisevic
On September 24–28, 2008 during the month of Ramadan, Sarajevo's first queer festival is trying to be organized among threats and attacks. Even if participants and festival organizers are obliged to cancel the festival in front of this violence, they don’t give up fighting for their rights…

SEA DOG’S DEVOTION
Austria, Germany, 2008, 35 mm, Color, 11’, No Dialogue
Director: Anna Kalus
In the film inspired from the poem of the same name by Joachim Ringelnatz, an old sailor tries to cope with the death of the woman he loves.

ABORTION DEMOCRACY: POLAND/SOUTH
Germany, 2008, DV, Color, 50’, English, Polish, English Subtitled
Director: Sarah Diehl
The film analyzes abortion laws in Poland and South Africa and how these laws affect women, through comparing them with each other and asking this question: "In Poland, abortion is not legal but why is it more easily accessible and secure than in South Africa where abortion is legal?”

LIONESS(ES)
South Korea, 2008, Super 16 mm, Color, 20’, Korean, English Subtitled
Director: Jae-Hee Hong
Jeong-hee is a vegetarian, her husband is a butcher. Jeong-hee constantly bears violence from her husband. Her neighbours give her advice to cope with it: the hunter and the prey change place…

TURKISH DIRECTORS

I’M NOT SICK MUM!
Turkey, 2009, DV, Color, 27’, Turkish, Kurdish, Turkish, English Subtitled
Director: Hatice Kamer
A quest of a young homosexual living in Batman for a new life, a new place, where he won’t be discriminated against because of his sexual identity…

ME AND NURI BALA
Turkey, 2000, DV, Color, 42’, Turkish, English Subtitled
Director: Melisa Önel
Based on the life of the "feminist transvestite girl" Esmeray, the film deals with gender, discrimination, otherization and immigration issues in Kars, where Esmeray was born and grew up and in Istanbul, where she currently lives.

THE VISITORS
Turkey, USA, 2009, Betacam, Color, 65’, English, Turkish Subtitled
Director: Melis Birder
Hundreds of women going every week in one of the 70 prisons in the state of the New York to see their beloved... Sometimes, the journey of these often black or Latin women lasts 25 hours. Some of them have spent every weekend in these buses for long years. The film accompanies these women on their journey and tells their sorrows, their hopes and their stories.

70 80 90, INNOCENT, INSOLENT, ENTICING
Turkey, 2010, DV, Color, 40’, Turkish, English Subtitled
Director: Melek Özman
Women in the Turkish cinema…  Rarely narrator, mostly subject, generally – in films directed by men - Innocent, Insolent, Enticing, but always two-dimensional:  "good" or "bad"? How much real is their goodness or malignity? Why aren’t they never listened to, believed or forgiven but always punished? In the film we follow, with Alin Taşçıyan, Arzu Okay, Lale Belkis, Agah Özgüç, Ülkü Erakalın and the cinema audience, what the Yeşilçam cinema sector did to these women and hear the seldom laughters of “enticing women” among the sobs of  "innocent women”...

ACROBAT
Turkey, 2009, HDV, Color, 6’, Turkish, English Subtitled
Director: Gamze Türkeri
A young man goes to a deserted road to commit suicide when he comes across a mysterious woman.

EYE - THEN - TEA - TEA - (IDENTITY)
Turkey, 2005, DV, Color, 3’ 41’’, No Dialogue
Director: Hande Çayır
The film asks this question: "What if we watch the film by positioning the 4 actors such as 3 +1 (the other or the leader), 2 +2 (side to side) or 4 +0 (group, community, family, etc...)?

THE PUPPETS
Czech Republic, 2009, Digital Photography, Color, 4’ 32’’, No Dialogue
Director: Özlem Akın
The film is about real and unreal dreams, for which everything can be sacrificed.

DEATH
Turkey, 2009, HDCam, Color, 19’, Turkish, English Subtitled
Directors: Burcu Aykar Şirin, Uygar Şirin
While spending a relaxing summer in his grandparents’ summer residence, Emre faces for the first time with death and mourning.

ONE OF US
Turkey, 2009, DV, Color, 78’, Turkish, English Subtitled
Director: Şehbal Şenyurt
The documentary follows people who are affected by schizophrenia and their relatives. It shows their struggle against social stigmatization.

VOICES
Turkey, 2009, HDV, Color, 19’ 52’’, Kurdish, Turkish, English Subtitled
Director: Filiz Işık Bulut
In the period of 12 September 1980 military coup, a slum near the Diyarbakir Prison No. 5 …… The only alive - lived place around the prison! How can this place welcome the detainees’ relatives and sounds coming from the prison? How can one live with the Diyarbakir prison?

A FATAL DRESS: POLYGAMY
Turkey, 2009, DV, Color, 45’, Kurdish, Turkish, Turkish, English Subtitled
Director: Müjde Arslan
Müjde Arslan: "My aunt Emine married her cousin when she was 16 years old, she was his second wife. Every time she was beaten by her husband, she took refuge in her father’s house but once her wounds healed it was every time her father who took her back to her home. I still remember my aunt Emine coming back to the village bare foot with swollen face and taken back forcibly to her house in tears: this is one of my first childhood memories. Each time she came, she was either pregnant or had a swollen face, sometimes both. At her late 30s, at a time when she had to swallow 8 drugs at every meal, she suffered from the side effects of one of them and had a paralysis” Based on the life story of Emine, the film analyzes the “death dress” of being a second wife, and the feelings of women forced to wear that dress.