Women and Documentary: Kim Longinotto

Divorce Iranian Style can be found at the Channel 4 On Demand site. Go here to play the film.

You may not have heard of Longinotto. She has been making documentaries for a number of years, building up a body of work that addresses controversial, even harrowing, topics: female circumcision in The Day I will Never Forget (2002), the difficulties of divorce within the Iranian system in Divorce Iranian Style (1998) or tackling domestic abuse in Cameroon in Sisters-in-Law (2005). Her latest documentary, Hold me Tight, Let me Go (2007), returns home, examining the relationship between staff and pupils in a school for traumatised children in Oxford.

A signature style is the intensity of the "performances" she obtains from her subjects. In Divorce Iranian Style, we follow a number of women through the cruel bureaucracy of a Tehran divorce court. Women seeking separation from unhappy or abusive relationships, demonstrate several, separate acts of resistance and "individual" solidarity, since they, somehow, separately stand together in the same battle. They have few rights under the law, but their emotion and determination is used to powerful effect. What emerges, I think, is the humanness (but constrained humanity) of those there, both men and women. The women's spirit is undaunted.

Longinotto's style in this is neither obtrusive or absent. In Divorce, the filmmakers are often applied to for opinions, both by the women and by the judge. However, she tends to use a self-effacing style of camerawork, avoiding a variety of shots, she tends to use the middle distance to show all the interactions whilst keeping us at a spectator's distance. Commentators have spoken of her "restrained gaze" that can still "radiate such warmth" (www.redpepper.org). Longinotto also states that her aim is not to lead with argument; instead, to allow viewers to find their own way through the material.

In interviews, Longinotto cames across as being incredibly humanistic and focussed on the subject matter. She makes an interesting comparison with fiction narratives: "I like it when documentary has the same constraints as fiction, when it doesn't have to give you a lesson or teach you what to think it's just an emotional experience." (imdb.com)

Longinotto won Screen International magazine's British documentary competition at Britdoc (UK documentary festival), with Hold me Tight, Let me Go. Sisters-in-Law, from which we will watch extracts, won the 'Prix de Art et Essai' at Cannes Film Festival. Stunning that no significant attention was paid by our prize-obsessed media.

Sisters-in-Law and Divorce Iranian Style are very similar in structure, following three/four stranded narratives. My final quote could apply to both: "Longinotto's deeply humane, but quietly unsensational portait of African women struggling for self-determination defies received notions about ... women."
(www.moviesgoa.org)

The name game

I blogged my reactions to The Namesake when I first saw it in May this year. You can check out the blog here. On a second viewing it worked just as well, but I got even more from it. I've softened a little on Kal Penn's performance, but I'm now an even bigger fan of Tabu and Irrfan Khan (the star of Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, despite Angelina Jolie's top billing).

This time I was more conscious of how clever the script is with the references to names and naming and also the extent to which Mira Nair pays hommage to Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak (and makes Bengali jokes). The central question is, I think, how the film creates a delicious tension between its focus on Ashima as against the father-son relationship. I'm still not sure who is at the centre of the story. What does anyone else think?

Beau Travail - by women about men

Tonight we discussed the history, the institutional context of women within the film industry. We looked at the idea of the woman's picture, whether it is possible to identify particular themes and content that could indicate a film is targeted for a female audience. We wondered whether it is useful to employ some of the cine-psychoanalytical approaches that would argue for a gendered gaze - in particular, whether it makes a difference that a man or woman are behind the camera (as director/cinematographer) or are part of the writing.

Thinking about the clip 'Beau Travail' - is it helpful to consider it as reflecting the gender of the filmmaker? Using the ideas we collected around 'The Piano', I would argue there is an amusingly ironic play of the private/domestic (stereotypically female) activities with our ideas of the French foreign legion. The soldiers' beautiful bodies are on display, but are domesticated - we see their private, ordinary interactions (as the Russian soldier learns French through naming the washing). This is juxtaposed with Rahel, a local girl, hanging out her own washing - more brightly coloured, less uniform. Has Claire Denis taken an archetypal male domain and somehow made it feminine?

Is it equally relevant that Denis spent her first ten years in West Africa (where her father was serving as an administrator in the French colonial services)? Her first feature 'Chocolat' drew directly on this experience and 'Beau Travail' continues this engagement withh French postcolonial identity.

Some of us talked about the sensory experience of these films, for example, the strong emphasis on touch in 'The Piano' - as it starts with that x-ray shot of her fingers. Denis, for me, is visually really striking - creating sensations of that world just through the light and colour on display. Some women film critics have argued for touch to be a particularly appealing to female audiences and filmmakers. Do you agree?

Some of this, and our discussion, focussed on the form (camera shots etc) rather than the content. But what do you see as the most relevant questions to ask - about form, about the content of the films or about the context of the filmmaker?

Pen Pictures of Directors (3): China

The Soong Sisters (Hong Kong 1997)

As far as I am aware, no films from Chinese women are available on DVD in the UK (it would be great to be proved wrong!). The two films that we may be able to see an extract from are both Hong Kong imports from Yes Asia. The service is good and the DVDs are not expensive. These two films are on good quality DVDs, but they can vary.

The experienced director Ann Hui (born 1947) is a key figure in Hong Kong Cinema. Born to a Chinese father and Japanese mother in Manchuria, she moved to Macao and then Hong Kong as a child and later spent two years at the London International Film School. She began work in Hong Kong television and then became part of the Hong Kong New Wave Cinema making prize-winning films such as Boat People (1982) one of a trilogy of 'Vietnam films'. More recently she has directed and acted in films with more of a populist feel. Jade Goddess of Mercy (2003) is an interesting film adapted from a popular novel. The young Chinese filmstar and pop star Vicki Zhou (Wei Zhao) plays a young policewoman working on a drug squad and juggling the job, a baby and a marriage under strain.

Mabel Cheung (born 1950) has had a similar career structure. She was born in Guangdong, Southern China, moved to Hong Kong, studied drama in the UK and joined Hong Kong television. After film school in New York, she began directing features in 1985. Her 1997 film The Soong Sisters is a biopic of the three sisters who each married one of the leaders of the Chinese Republic in the early 20th Century (one married Sun Yat-Sen, one a banker and Finance Minister and one Chiang Kai-Shek) and who played an important role in Chinese public life up until the 1980s. The film also celebrated the best acting talents in Hong Kong Cinema with Maggie Cheung and Michelle Yeoh playing alongside Vivian Wu (better known in American films and television).

There are several other Chinese women directors currently active and some of them are referenced on this website describing an event at the Hong Kong International Film Festival.

Earlier this year, as part of the China 07 Festival, Cecile Tang (Shu Shuen Tong)'s 1970 film The Arch was screened at the National Media Museum and we blogged a report on our sister blog.

2 Days in Paris

Julie Delpy and Adam Goldberg in 2 Days in Paris


I rather enjoyed Julie Delpy's film. It's a kind of romantic comedy with elements of screwball and (very mild) grossout contemporary comedy that features a French woman and an American man who live together in New York and are visiting Paris on the way back from a holiday in Venice.

It is almost biographical in the sense that Delpy is an actor who has been out of France for some time. She had previously co-scripted the second film she made with Ethan Hawke for Richard Linklater, Before Sunset (2004). That film covered the brief meeting of an American man and a French woman who had met before (in 1995's Before Sunrise). In the new film, a similar scenario is played for laughs and Delpy directs and even writes some of the music.

Overall, I took this to be an American-style comedy, but with a French script that was more intelligent than American 30-something comedies and less whiny than Woody Allen. Allen is a reference point since the American man is half-Jewish and played by a Jewish-looking actor who in the film is mistaken for an Arab. I mention this because the film plays with the character's sense of Jewish denial (and a stereotypical French response) and because it is indicative of the kind of material in the film which seems to have upset many of the IMDB commentators, both French and American. But as one of the other users notes, these kinds of jokes are made in all cosmopolitan cities. So, get over it, I suppose.

I think it is depressing when Delpy gets criticised for being egoistic. She has produced intelligent, adult (i.e. grown-up) comedy. That's pretty rare in my view.

As to the difficulties of finding finance for a film like this, Julie Delpy must have some clout, but I noted that it was a French/German co-production, which possibly explains the brief cameo appearance of Daniel Bruehl.

Pen Pictures of directors (2): Iran

The Makhmalbaf Film House

The remarkable family of filmmakers known as the Makhmalbaf Film House (the website is well worth visiting) comprises Mohsen, Marziyeh, Samira, Maysam and Hana. Mohsen spent four and a half years as a teenage militant in the Shah's prison until his release in 1979. This self-educated man has since devoted himself to alleviating the 'cultural poverty' of Iran with books and films which have often fallen foul of the censors. In 1996 he retired from the Iranian 'film industry' and opened a film school in which he taught, amongst others, his own three children and his second wife, Marziyeh. The family have subsequently produced several award-winning films.

Samira is the eldest daughter and has had the most stellar career so far. In 1998, aged 21, she took her film The Apple to Cannes and many other festivals where she won prizes. In 2000 Blackboards won her the Jury Prize at Cannes and a nomination for the Palme d'Or. She contributed to 11'09"01 -- September 11 (2002) and in 2003 directed At 5 in the Afternoon. She is currently working on Two-Legged Horse for 2008 release -- despite a bomb attack on the production in Afghanistan.

Marziyeh Meshkini (pictured above) has worked as assistant director for Mohsen and Samira and has directed two features herself. The Day I Grew Up To Be a Woman (2000) will be shown on the course. Stray Dog (2004) is another product of the Makhmalbaf Film House move to projects in Afghanistan after 2001.

Maysam has so far made one film -- a documentary about the filming by his sister of Blackboards.

Hana is Samira's young sister. Although only 19, she has already made a short film (when she was 9) and a documentary The Joy of Madness (when she was 14) about her sister's experience on At 5 in the Afternoon. She has also published a book of poems.

As is evident from these brief descriptions, the Makhmalbafs all work on each other's films and they are able to finance their productions through the Film House and its partnerships with production companies outside Iran (often in France).

Pen Pictures of directors (1): India

Some directors who will feature on the course, who you may wish to investigate:

Deepa Mehta
This Canadian director was born in Amritsar in the Punjab and emigrated after getting her degree in philosophy from Delhi University. She started directing aged 40 in Canada and she is best known internationally for her trilogy of films set in India. This ‘elemental trilogy’ deals with issues relevant to women in Indian society. Fire (1996) looks at a marriage in which a young woman discovers that her husband has married her for convenience and she is drawn into a relationship with her sister-in-law.

Earth (1998) concerns the fate of families caught up in the struggles over Indian partition in 1947 in a story seen from the perspective of a young girl and Water (2005) focuses on the fate of a child bride who is widowed and forced to live in a house with other widows in 1930s Benares. An important aspect of Deepa Mehta’s work is her casting of Shabana Azmi, one of Indian Cinema’s leading female stars, who has herself undertaken several campaigns on feminist issues. Another star, Nandita Das appeared in the first two films of the trilogy and would have joined Shabana Azmi if production on Water had not been halted by the disruption caused by Hindu fundamentalist protestors. For more about Water, read the brief review on our associate blog.

Mira Nair
Born in Orissa, Mira Nair also went to North America to train as a documentary filmmaker, basing herself in the US. She began directing in her early twenties, but first came to international attention with Salaam Bombay in 1988, a documentary-drama about streetchildren in Bombay, funded by public and private investors in India, Channel 4 in the UK and a French production company. In 1991 she made Mississippi Masala, about an inter-racial affair between the daughter of East African Indian immigrants (played by Sarita Choudhury) and an African-American man in the Southern US (played by Denzil Washington). After some less successful films, she finally had a major hit with Monsoon Wedding in 2001, which married the conventions of very different forms of cinema – the loose visual style of European and American Independent Cinema with the intensity of Indian Parallel Cinema and the exuberance of Bollywood.

In 2004 Reese Witherspoon starred in Mira Nair’s adaptation of Vanity Fair, which perhaps didn’t get the big audiences it deserved, and in 2006 she directed The Namesake which we will be screening on the course. Again, there is a a brief review of this film on our associate blog.

Although Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta have similar backgrounds and are both 'diaspora filmmakers' returning to India to make films, the films themselves look and feel quite different. Deepa Mehta's films might seem to be more concerned with 'issues' and her Indian films have something of the qualities of Indian 'Parallel Cinema', the socially conscious 'alternative cinema' of the 1970s-80s. This makes Water, with its use of music by A. R. Rahman, the leading composer of Indian popular cinema, particularly interesting as a development. By contrast, Mira Nair seems less concerned with specific issues and more concerned with characters, often, but not always, women. If Mira Nair is a more 'popular' director, it is because she chooses to work in ways more associated with popular genre cinema -- particularly genres associated with female audiences, such as romance, family saga, melodrama etc.

Both directors have consistently worked with women in prominent production roles. Not surprisingly, women are very often writers, editors and production designers -- but none of the films mentioned above are photographed by women. Lydia Dean Pilcher has been Mira Nair's producer on most of her films.