Women In The Director's Chair, 941 W. Lawrence, (773) 907-0610; www.widc. org: The 22nd Annual Women In The Director's Chair International Film & Video Festival March 14-23.
The 22nd Annual Women In The Director's Chair International Film & Video Festival opens March 14 and runs until March 23. Billed as 'the world's largest, oldest and most diverse showcase of films and videos by women directors,' the festival is non-competitive. Some films that have been shown at the Women In The Director's Chair festival have gone on to experience success at other festivals and with mainstream audiences. I recently sat down with Program Director Sabrina Craig in WIDC's theater on Lawrence Avenue in Uptown to discuss the 2003 film festival and to learn more about WIDC.
Gregg Shapiro: Tell me something about your interest in film and how you came to be involved with WIDC.
Sabrina Craig: I've been on staff here, at WIDC, for almost six years as program director. Before that, I was a member of the board of WIDC and before that I was a volunteer. In terms of being involved with Women In The Director's Chair, it's been a long time. Maybe nine years, almost since I moved to Chicago. I came here to go to Northwestern for the Radio/TV/Film graduate program. I almost immediately found out about Women In The Director's Chair through the screenings that WIDC was doing at Northwestern. It was the real world component to the academic thing that was going on there.
GS: Are they still doing WIDC events at Northwestern?
SC: Yes, they are. It's part of our tour. We do a festival tour that takes programs from the festival to campuses and community centers around the country throughout the year. Northwestern has been a host of the tour every year, for 13 years now. There is a screening or two or three there every year as well as U. of C., and sometimes Columbia and S.I.U. There are a lot of them around the Midwest and we go as far as Seattle and New Mexico. It's been all over the place.
GS: There were 750 entries for this year's festival. What can you tell me about the process of selecting films and videos?
SC: It's unique. As far as I know, there is no other festival anywhere that has a process that is as intensive and inclusive as we do, at this point. The process starts with us inviting 75 judges from around the city. We look for people who don't necessarily have a media background. We also try to create a body of judges that reflects who we want our audience to be, which is not necessarily a bunch of film and video makers. Teachers, lawyers, carpenters, dentists, plumbers. We try to pull together a body of women, girls and transgender people that reflects the community we're trying to create around the festival. We invite them in and break them into small groups of no more than five people. Then they spend four or five Saturdays watching all 750 tapes. We try to convey to them that the score they give should not be solely based upon your own personal, private experience of the tape, but also on the discussion that it generates in your group. If a piece is really rough, but so interesting that you spent 30 minutes talking about it, that's fantastic! That's what we want the festival to be. All these people coming together, talking about the work, engaging with each other, arguing about things. It's not all about the most cutting-edge piece, although we try to get a filmmaker or professor in every group so that they can recognize if something is really avant-garde. But also people who have never been involved with a film festival who can say, 'I don't know why, but I really like that one. It's just cool.'
GS: Do you have people who come back to participate every year in the process?
SC: Definitely. There are some people who have been doing it for years. But we also try to shake it up. ... Everything that gets a score of seven or higher goes to the next level which is the programming committee that I coordinate. We meet every week for three months and review the pieces that got a seven or higher. We take work home and bring it back and talk about it. It's very discursive. ... We think the festival is supposed to create discourse and conversation and inspire people to act and respond and not just say, 'That was nice. Let's get a pizza.' It's more about how the media we watch inspires our lives, thoughts and experience of the world.
GS: According to the current schedule, the nights are broken down into themes. Is it a challenge to come up with the themes for the screenings and do you ever repeat themes from year to year?
SC: One of the most interesting things about making the festival is that the themes emerge from the work every year. We don't set out to make a program about family or immigration or, for this year, war. Sometimes there is a lot of energy around the idea or shifting borders or gender identity and new definitions, so the creation of the different theme in the programming just happens as we watch and talk about and make notes about the work. This year there was a lot of work around issues of activism and a lot of responses to Sept. 11. Processing of international relations, nationalism, Americanism, war, looking back at other wars, conflicts, trying to place themselves within the global crisis that we are experiencing now.
GS: Of the films that I screened for review, most of them were documentaries. Is that pretty standard?
SC: We don't get a lot of big, feature film submissions. We get a few and we're pretty tough on them because we demand that they are not just entertaining, but that they tell us something new, that they're breaking new ground. That's a high standard for a feature that other festivals might enjoy. We also get a lot of documentary submissions and we have theories about that. One of them is funding. Sometimes it's easier to get funding for an issue-based piece than it is for a story-based piece. For example, Yvonne Welbon's Sisters In Cinema, she got funders who were really interested in the topic of African-American women directors and wanted to see that piece made. That happens a lot with documentaries. It's easier to find people (with funding) who are interested in the subject than with features (where) you may be a little more on your own or (you are) looking for people who just believe in you (laughs).
Women who are making media on the fringes, not in the Hollywood system or a big money network, they're relying on people who are really passionate about what they're making media about to support their work.
I think that's why a women's festival, in particular, finds a lot of documentaries.
GS: Chicago is a city bursting with film festivals. Do you feel as though you are in competition with the others?
SC: I don't feel a strong sense of competition. We try, as much as possible, as a festival community not to overlap with each other. It works most of the time. I think there's some overlap this year with the Chicago International Documentaries, but just for a few days at the end. There is also a huge film-going audience in Chicago and we can provide enough media for them to watch. The Chicago International (Film Festival) appeals to an enormously broad mainstream festival-going audience. The more community-based festivals are more niche-oriented. The smaller ones like Reeling, Asian-American Showcase, Silver Imageswe know each other and try to cross-promote each other and to build the festival-going public.
GS: 2003 looks to be a promising year for women filmmakers, beginning as it does with new films by Rose Troche and Lisa Cholodenko.
SC: It's really exciting, especially because of Rose being from Chicago. WIDC was the fiscal sponsor for Go Fish and everyone involved in WIDC at that time worked in some way on Go Fish. Rose is one of our own. GS: She's family.
SC: Exactly. For her to be creating new work and having so much success is exciting and rewarding. It feels great that women are getting some support and getting their work out. Of course, it's still not easy, particularly for women of color or queer women. Both Rose and Lisa have broken through, but there's hundreds more that are really terrific, too. I'm hoping that Rose and Lisa are trailblazing and creating openings in their wake.
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The well-attended, long-running festival features premieres of feature films, the Chicago debuts of international works and video productions at a variety of venues including the WIDC Theater (941 W. Lawrence), LaSalle Theater (4901 W. Irving Park Rd.), Charles A. Hayes Family Investment Center (4859 S. Wabash) and Columbus Drive Auditorium (280 S. Columbus). Some highlights of the more than 150 films and videos being screened follow below. Included in the March 14 opening night selections is Yvonne Welbon's educational and entertaining Sisters In Cinema. In this documentary, Welbon traces the rare, but rich, history of African-American female filmmakers. Beginning with author and cinema pioneer Zora Neale Hurston and continuing to such artists as Darnell Martin and Kasi Lemmons, Welbon maintains her status among exceptional documentary filmmakers.
On Saturday, March 15, Su Friedrich's The Odds Of Recovery is being screened. This deeply personal documentary revolves around a series of ongoing health issues and subsequent surgeries experienced by the filmmaker, beginning in 1977. Combining medical texts, doctor visits, the actual procedures, video and photographic documentation, and the methods in which she dealt with her situation, Friedrich unflinchingly records her journey from illness to recovery in frank and graphic terms.
Monday, March 15's selections include the haunting Ghost Cities. Filmed in Chicago, Ines Sommer's dramatic presentation stars Terri Reardon as Therese and focuses on the young woman's descent into the fringes of society.
As part of the 'New Asian and Asian American Films' series is Haijiao Tianya/ Incidental Journey. Set in Taiwan, Incidental Journey takes us on a daring journey shared by two lesbians, one of whom has just broken up with her girlfriend and the other who is about to visit the only woman she has ever loveda straight woman who has gotten married to a man.
The 'Dyke Nite' screenings include films of differing lengths, such as Elisabeth Subrin's music video for the Le Tigre track 'Well, Well, Well,' and Slam Box (Untitled), Tane Ross's animated poetry video representing 'spoke word artist' Tyger. Young, queer women are also given voices in two wonderful short films. Carolyn Caizzi and Laura Rodriguez's delightful Camouflage Pink introduces us to high school aged dyke Rayna, who gets to take a cheerleader to the prom.
You 2 is both the name of Pascale Simmons and Jenny Munhumer's feature and the name of the lesbian bar where Sandra, a young woman who works at her mother's hair salon, goes to explore her burgeoning interest in women.
A majority of the films that I was able to screen were documentaries. One of the most fascinating documentaries was Laura Nix's Whether You Like It Or Not: The Story of Hedwig. Nix does a wonderful job of tracing the history of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, from its inception in an NYC nightclub to its acclaimed theatrical debut to its evolution into a film.
Audre Lorde and Joan Nestle are featured in documentaries that close the festival March 23. The Edge of Each Other's Battles: The Vision of Audre Lorde is Jennifer Abod's radical portrait of the late Audre Lorde; it focuses on a controversial conference honoring the poet and activist. While the appropriately titled Hand On The Pulse, Joyce Warshow's loving and generous documentary about writer, educator and lesbian-feminist activist Joan Nestle is an honest portrait of and tribute to an important figure in world of contemporary women's history.