Powerful Female Characters in Contemporary Cinema
Anna, the first feature by Italian director Marco Amenta (shown out of competition in the Green Planet category), chooses an atypical young woman as the main character. You could say she’s a woman of integrity. It’s interesting to see how the film parallels Anna’s struggle to be a free woman, to escape her complicated situation of domestic violence and find her independence, with her solitary struggle to preserve her land and her traditional way of life, in the face of a huge multinational company that is creating jobs in the region but at the same time destroying nature and changing the healthy, natural way of life of the inhabitants.
In this sense, the film’s ecological concept fits well with the link created between femininity and the strong emotional relationship with nature, the sea, and the attachment to a territory. Anna herself seems to be an earthly element of the island. Despite the sometimes unjustifiably long scenes, and the fact that the filmmaker tries to attract the widest possible audience through a predictable sequence of events, the powerful acting, the beautiful (but non-touristy) landscapes of Sardinia, and the touching images of the goats awaiting their fate, are memorable. It was one of the films shown at the festival this year to feature impressive female characters.
In Les Miennes, the joyful work of young Moroccan documentary filmmaker Samira El Mouzghibati (presented in the national competition), we also see this particular attention paid to the relationship between women and a culture, a territory. It’s a film with a remarkable sense of humor, choosing a light-hearted tone to deal with a serious subject, the systemic and traditional oppression of women in certain cultures.Unlike Anna (which uses a rather serious tone), the characters are not treated individually, but their existence only makes sense as a family. Many of the women are connected by the powerful bonds of sisterhood and the weighty mother/daughter relationship. We find that in this family (perhaps a symbol for all other families in this country), women act together, finding strength in community, while the only significant male character (the father) remains marginal most of the time.
The complicated relationship between a mother and her daughter is also at the heart of Keeping Mom (Maman déchire), a French documentary—not a very happy one, actually. In this revenge movie, director Emilie Brisavoine has the courage to question her mother directly and reveal their complicated, intimate relationship in a rather shameless way. She points the camera on her mother in everyday moments of her life in Paris, and seeks to establish a dialogue, sometimes very harsh, in order to revisit their respective pasts, the daughter’s childhood and the mother’s childhood, to dig together into the origins of their traumas and propose a therapy. Despite the difficulty of overcoming their deep-seated traumas, both characters, especially the mother, are charismatic.
Finally, in The Permanent picture (La Imatge permanent), one of the most remarkable films of the entire festival, shown in the Director’s Week selection, the intergenerational relationship between women (grandmother, mother, daughter) finds a visually beautiful form, thanks to the particularly meticulous static frames, in which every element, especially the human face, has an aesthetic (photographic) value. In the cold, minimalistic, and absurd atmosphere of the film, two women encounter, understand, love, and protect each other, even before discovering the blood ties that unite them. Laura Ferrés’s first feature is also an ode to feminine power in a difficult period of oppression that spans 50 years of history in Spain.
Shiva Fouladi
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2024