Systems in the break-short reviews from the remake festival

Telling what is never told, showing what is never shown: the third Frankfurt Women's Film Days were dedicated to invisible or unrecognized work - and diverse forms of resistance. Notes from students of the FU Berlin.

The third edition of the Festival Remake. Frankfurt Women's Film Days was dedicated to the main topic "... because only what makes money counts": women, work and film and thus diverse aspects of invisible or unrecognized work: in the kitchen, household and relationships, in factories and offices, on the film set, in the village community – not only do the feminization, migrantization and sexualization of work come into focus, but also the most diverse forms of resistance against discrimination and exploitation.

Tôi ippon no michi / The Far Road (JP 1977; Director: Sachiko Hidari)

The father, alone in his room. He freaked out, hit his son, yelled at his family, knocked over the table - a claustrophobic look at the too narrow apartment. The starting point of The Far Road is a broken system – the daughter wants to decide for herself who she marries; Mother and brother are on her side. The father no longer seems to understand the world. His work in track bed maintenance for the Japanese railways is just as precarious as his power in the family.

This relationship between tradition and modernity, manual and machine work, patriarchy and emancipation leads us through a tottering epic. Fossil Hokkaidō is a place that is lagging behind in time. Everyone has to constantly work to keep up with the change. Every new machine is critically examined; they don't seem to fit into the rigid system.

But change is happening – while the younger generation is more flexible in their roles, the old are struggling to learn new things; women seek a place outside the domestic sphere, men seek work beyond their hands. Family and trade unions are always at the center, institutions in which gender, class and generational conflicts take place. In the end, the question remains what is worth keeping. The island of the sunset is deserted, the daughter's decision accepted, the view open - the electric train remains an eerie place.

C. Stetzuhn

Ekmek parası / Money for Bread (DE 1994; Director: Serap Berrakkarasu)

Serap Berrakkarasu and Gisela Tuchtenhagen find different female perspectives in a Lübeck fish factory. The story of tired hands repeating the same movements over and over again on a moving line isn't just limited to factory work; the film also tells of the changes and difficulties that women from Turkey experience during migration and women from Mecklenburg during the reunification of Germany.

Berrakkarasu and Tuchtenhagen are guests in the homes of these women with a 16mm camera. With her language and her questions, Berrakkarasu manages to make the women feel understood and the audience to sympathize with them. Thanks to the director's open-hearted relationship with the portrayed, everything seems natural and real. The silent moments in the film are filled with facial expressions. Although they come from different backgrounds, all of the women who have been given full responsibility for raising children and doing all the housework tell of the same struggle for life.

The most touching thing about Ekmek parası is that there are hardly any dreams or hopes in the fish factory and yet the women don't stop singing and dancing - and that's how the film ends.

Ceren Özyurt

Dzień za dniem / Day by Day (PL 1988; Director: Irena Kamieńska)

The black and white film focuses entirely on the strenuous work of throwing the bricks. The women work together, believing that their efforts will bring a better future. The feelings and memories of one of them are presented in the voice-over. She describes the arduous physical work that defines her whole life. The pictures show the depressive vision of a post-war Poland, people working in ruins.

The film tells about the hope of the Polish nation after the war. It operates similarly to communist propaganda films by telling the story of the entire population by example. It also presents the only hope provided by Stalinism. The grand parade with portraits of Stalin carried by the masses is a reminder that the work serves a greater purpose. In the montage, however, this idealistic hope is constantly contrasted with the images of the miserable living conditions of everyday people.

On the audio track, the woman talks about the chores she still has to do after work. You can feel the disappointment of reality in her voice. The most striking feature of their statements remains the inhuman fatigue.

Maciej Wierzbicki

Sarangio (DE/IT 1993; Director: Cinzia Bullo)

Sometimes people use their eyes, ears and fingertips to remember stories from small villages that seem like something out of a fairy tale. Both in the Italian village of Sarangio and in the film of the same name, two such women are the focus: Marina and Adelaide have lived in the mountain village on Lake Maggiore for 57 years and vividly remember who left and who came. The audience in front of the screen follows their voices. Sometimes the images linger in freeze frames. Due to their simultaneous discoloration, they look like they are from a photo album. The film fixes the time and space of the village. Through him, viewers can explore both.

The stories in this film are so small that they don't feel extraordinary. Still, if there's a reason Sarangio's stories are so special, it's probably because of the very long, close, and intimate communication between the few protagonists in such a small village. Since Marina and Adelaide unconsciously leave out a lot of information, their meandering conversations appear unstructured to outsiders. But it also transports us into a nostalgia that evokes memories of our own childhood, like the conversations of adults around the table, which we listened to carefully without really knowing what it was all about.

Jungwook Ryu

Country women. Three Generations on One Farm (DE 1978; Director: Roswitha Ziegler, Niels Bolbrinker)

The documentary looks like a groping therapy taster session - there is a lot of talking but little said. Grandmother, mother and daughter live side by side on one farm. Pig farming is passion, work is work and farming is destiny; that's what they believe and leave enough room for friction despite, or perhaps because of, their closeness to one another. Whether the hand-woven tablecloths will one day be inherited; whether it would be better to purchase a milking machine; whether one will ever make it to New York: questions that determine the everyday life of these women. The film carefully taps the potential for conflict that simmers beneath these superficialities once or twice with its index finger, instead of cutting it open and exhibiting it so harshly for the viewers, as it shows the slaughter of a sow at one point. Contrary to this, there are pictures of piglets happily hopping around Grandma Hermine (82) – and otherwise the montage also opens up cyclically recurring internal contradictions. Helga (45) and her husband have nothing to say to each other after many years of marriage - that's normal. After completing her training as a dental assistant, 21-year-old Heidrun aspires to marry a farmer so that she can pursue her preconceived path in life. Past, present and future meet in this work and merge into silence.

Iris King

Shoes (USA 1916; Director: Lois Weber)

This film offers a rare glimpse into the life of a hard working woman in 1916. Eva in Shoes has to give her wages to her family to pay the rent. But she herself urgently needs new shoes and has to go to work every day with broken ones. Although her father makes the announcements in the house, he does not go to work himself. Every day Eva has to make new soles out of cardboard. After three days of rainy weather, her shoes completely dissolved away and she became ill. Throughout the film, Eva often imagines what it would be like to be wealthy. You get a glimpse of the life Eva could have led if she hadn't been born poor.

Director and producer Lois Weber addresses many social issues in Shoes. The film offers an insight into the social conditions under which women from Eva's milieu had to work and live. It is amazing how selflessly Eva acts and is willing to do anything for her family, even though her father is so ungrateful. The fact that she ends up prostituting herself in order to finally be able to buy new shoes is just as shocking as the portrayal of the social circumstances that led her to make this decision.

Lina Hoyda

Janine (USA 1990; Director: Cheryl Dunye)

Janine seems relentlessly honest and gets straight to the point. Cheryl Dunye's debut short film tells the story of a young teenage black lesbian woman grappling with her identity. On the one hand, their love story as a teenager offers a basis with which practically all viewers can identify. But it also serves as a fundamental vehicle for the cinematic narrative, which focuses on the class and identity differences between love interest Janine (the wealthy, straight, white girl) and Cheryl (the lesbian, black woman from a working-class family). Intercut scenes of Cheryl's face and candles create a sense of detachment from the narrative and create small windows for viewers to reflect. The subtitles, on the other hand, connect us to their message and story in a very mundane and stereotypical way. The anecdotal narrative is an approach later taken up in The Watermelon Woman (USA 1996). The main character's tenacity and humor give the impression that she remains combative despite all difficulties.

Amir Naghavialhosseini

À la vie (FR 2021; Director: Aude Pépin)

We accompany a woman with a suitcase through the city. She has a goal. That woman is Chantal Birman. She is a midwife who is also responsible for aftercare. Filmmaker Pépin introduces the film at the Remake Film Festival: she has made it her mission to bring mothers to the fore.

There are moments of awkwardness and the urge to help. Be it carrying the suitcase up the stairs for the 70-year-old midwife or wiping away a mother's tears. Where the camera would otherwise pan to the crying baby, here it stays with the young mother. The settings are long and agonizing. They are necessary for Pépin's intention in order to tell what is never told, to show what is never seen. The women that Birman visits bring with them a special openness that I personally can only meet with respect. Problems with breastfeeding, family problems and baby blues get their own voice in this film, the voice of the woman. Birman herself reports incidentally on her life. The ease with which she tells her own horrific abortion story makes it more bearable.

Walking through the crowd of a demonstration seems very posed and almost forced, next to the women expressing themselves so authentically.

À la vie is a bittersweet journey by a woman who accompanies women through their aftercare. Aude Pépin did a great job of focusing the woman's gaze. The film is uncomfortably pleasant, and that makes it special.

Oona Malinowski

The viewer is initially denied a picture. The first seconds of À la vie are black, everything remains invisible. Two female voices speaking to each other. It's about birth. It quickly becomes clear that we are overhearing a midwife's dialogue with a mother. Finally she appears: a young mother with her baby on her stomach. It is this visualization that the film strives for. Chantal Birman, who is about to retire, is the midwife whose working reality you can be kidnapped here. She travels episodically from one mother to the next, advising, comforting, examining. The insights into the mental and physical condition of the women are unusually honest and direct.

The camera always remains an invisible observer. The intimacy seems completely undisturbed, which makes it completely believable - and yet the bitter taste of the planned staging may spread. When Birman walks through a crowd of people during a conversation, the camera perspectives clearly refer to a dialogue that has been edited and possibly even rotated several times. À la vie is in fact a documentary that in parts seems to be attempting to be a feature film. The attempt to unite the scenic character of the latter with the proximity of a documentary becomes apparent again and again. Nevertheless, Aude Pépin manages in a unique way to make visible and tangible what rarely seems visible and tangible: the woman after childbirth.

Michel Cremer