Three powerful films brought to life by female directors

It’s women’s month in SA but there’s no official holiday, commemoration or reason generally needed to celebrate the wealth of provocative, memorable and intelligently curious contributions made by women to the history of cinema.

Here are a documentary, a feature and a trilogy of short experimental films that offer three very different, but engagingly thoughtful depictions and dissections of the issues that permeate everyday life, that just happen to be directed by three very different but exceptionally talented female directors.

THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL:

We (Nous) — Mubi.com

Documentarian Alice Diop’s 2021 film melds together the stories of different characters whose only seeming link is their proximity to the RER B, a railway line that runs through the outlying suburbs of Paris.

Gradually the film becomes an essay on the social realities of life in postcolonial France and the social absurdities and historically unjust divisions that the railway line has been created to keep in place between the city of love’s affluent middle class citizens and its poorer mostly immigrant working class outsiders.

Cleverly mixing titbits from her own personal story as the child of African immigrants with the broader social issues that affect the lives of her subjects, Diop creates a subtle but deeply affecting deconstruction of modern day France that places its much lauded celebration of multiculturalism under the microscope and asks pertinent and difficult questions about the reality that lies beneath the slogans.

The “we” in her film are, in spite of their struggles for acceptance and day-to-day survival, just as much a part of the idea of France and “French-ness” as the more visible stereotypes associated with the nation in the eyes of the world.

Finally, the film is also a smart interrogation of traditional ideas about how documentaries are made and whether the ideas of a separation between the observer and those observed actually work to reinforce larger cultural and social mechanisms of separation.

It all works slowly but carefully together to offer a unique and innovative means of re-evaluating how we see ourselves and others and how storytelling can be a shared means of bringing us closer towards each other through better ways of looking and hearing.

Trailer:

THE STONE COLD CLASSIC:

Cléo from 5 to 7 — Mubi.com

There’s still something uniquely fresh and vibrant about French New Wave pioneer Agnes Varda’s 1962 film about two hours in the life of a young woman waiting nervously for a medical test result.

Cléo (Corinne Marchand) is a pop singer waiting to break onto the charts whose thoughts and routine on a Parisian afternoon — between what the French call the hours of love from 5pm to 7pm — are consumed by gloom and existential dread as she waits for what she believes are tests that will tell her she has cancer.

She tries to occupy her time by doing all the things a young ‘60s Parisian pop star might be expected to do — visiting a cafe, shopping for clothes, trying to work on new music — but gradually her fears of mortality and bad news begin to swell ever louder.

In the male dominated, reference-filled world of the French New Wave, Varda’s work generally, and here in particular, presents a more nuanced, emotionally engaging and considered approach as she casts her keen photographic eye on one of many ordinary human stories among the thousands we pass each day on the bustling streets of cities everywhere.

It’s a skilfully balanced film that manages to evoke the sounds and sights of everyday Paris while also simultaneously conveying them through the experiences of its emotionally shattered heroine and ultimately taking its audience on a quietly exhilarating emotional journey that keeps us waiting to find out whether Cléo may have more than a few lover’s hours left yet to enjoy.

Trailer:

THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH:

Akosua Adoma Owusu — The Hair Trilogy — Mubi.com

Ghanaian-American experimental director Akosua Adoma Owusu’s three films on the subject of black hair culture, made over a period from 2009 to 2019, offer a smart, energetic and subversive examination of her rewardingly tangled cultural subject.

My White Baby (2009) picks apart the director’s own history as the American born daughter of Ghanaian immigrants and the broader history of ideas about Eurocentric beauty as they play out in the representations used in the signage and advertising of salons in Ghana. Combining archive and found footage with filmed vignettes that tell the story of Owusu’s family’s migration from Africa, the film weaves a provocative meditation on identity and its expression through the common practices of cosmetics and hairstyling, all to the accompaniment of a memorably toe-tapping Afro-funk heavy soundtrack.

Split Ends, I Feel Wonderful (2012) is a five-minute, short, sharp and playful found-footage assemblage that celebrates the black pride movement of the 1970s through an examination of its women and their hairstyles.

White Afro (2019) is an equally short but probing found-footage remix in which the director uses her own mother’s experiences of working in a predominantly white hair salon in the US state of Virginia to interrogate the implications of a training video made for white hairstylists to learn how to employ black hair style techniques on white clients for the purpose of maximising profits.

Trailer: