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Is a Birds Eye View unique to birds?

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by Kerry McLeod
Still from Six Yards to Democracy, screening at the festival Still from Six Yards to Democracy, screening at the festival The 2007 edition of the Birds Eye View Film Festival opened at the National Film Theatre last Thursday with a selection of the best in international short films by women. Now in its third year, the festival boasts an increased programme of international features, documentaries and special events. The atmosphere at the opening night event was celebratory, a feeling that’s palpable through the entire programme of events. Although the much bandied figure of 7% - the percentage of feature film directors who are women - remains depressingly intact, there’s no sense at the festival that this is cause for breast-beating consternation.

Motivated by the lack of female role models in film, Birds Eye View began in 2002 with the aim of redressing the balance via screenings and educational initiatives. The impressively passionate co-founder and festival director Rachel Milward ruminates about the organisation’s aims and achievements: “[I] think it’s reopened a debate… about women’s contribution to film, and people thinking about that, and it’s also raised the issue within the industry that there are so few women filmmakers. It’s highlighted that and it keeps repeatedly highlighting that. And I think that unless you’re constantly saying ‘this isn’t ok, this isn’t ok’ then it just sort of slides away from the limelight and people accept it again.”

Lately the question occupying Milward’s mind has been the existence (or not) of a female sensibility in film: does a film directed by a woman have characteristics that mark it out as having a uniquely female vision?

“It’s such a complicated question and I think it will always be. I don’t want it to be resolved and sometimes I go through phases where I think come on, let’s focus on the fact that there’s only 7% of filmmakers who are women and let’s just make sure we get that better, and let’s not talk about the kind of things women might say because that seems really limiting and really restricting. And I think it’s really important to keep that attitude.”

And yet she cannot deny that there’s a commonality among the films in this year’s programme, be they the moving drama Away From Her, actress Sarah Polley’s directorial debut which stars Julie Christie as a woman with Alzheimers, or the personal history of The Genocide in Me, a documentary about the legacy of the Armenian genocide. It’s a certain intimacy, a complexity in the views presented, that so many of the films seem to share. “I don’t want to claim it as a female trait,” she hastens to add, “but it does come through this programme so I can’t actually deny it, and I think it’s really exciting and something to really celebrate. But I think we also need to hold that in tension with the fact that if we want to make action films and comedies that’s brilliant.”

It’s certainly true that many of the short films shown on the opening night – such as And There in the Dust, an animation from South Africa dealing with an unspeakable act of violence in a small town, or I Remember Lebanon, a powerful polemic – are poignant and hard-hitting films, dealing with serious issues. One of the film’s shown in the Opening Night programme was a short animation called Dreams and Desires: Family Ties, centring on a woman called Beryl who discovers a wealth of cinematic inspiration when she’s given a camcorder, which she attempts to put into practice while filming her friend’s wedding. It’s beautifully drawn and constructed, and delightfully warm and funny. Everyone I’ve spoken to about the films shown that night admits to liking it – but in subdued tones, with a naughty smile, as if the film is a guilty pleasure. The director, Joanna Quinn, even apologised in the Q&A for making such a lightweight film. Is there a danger that ‘women’s films’ become something that’s labelled as a certain type of aesthetic? “Bring on the comedy!” says Milward. “It would be awful if everything was totally depressing all the time. Not that I think the other films are depressing… [some of them are] about really horrific things but they’re not told in a completely bleak way. I think that’s quite interesting.”

I mention that in a recent interview, the award-winning documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto railed against the observation made about her work: that she tends to focus on women’s stories. As she points out, nobody would ask a male director why he chooses to make films about men. “I think it’s really important to think about that. There are so many things to hold in tension and it’s not accurate as soon as you lose one of them.” Yet equally, she counters, we mustn’t be ashamed to celebrate work both by and about women. It is, after all, what the festival does so well. “The fact that we find it worth commenting on I think just shows how little of it we see. If we saw it 50-50, we wouldn’t think it was worth commenting on, but the fact that we are… shows that it doesn’t happen very much and shows that we are still seeing stories from the male perspective most of the time, and that’s what is the norm.”

However, like the festival itself, Milward is upbeat about the future: “It’s not as if suddenly 50% of filmmakers are women, it’s not going to happen overnight, it’s going to take a really long time and lots more activities, than just this. I do think that I genuinely see that it gives emerging women filmmakers inspiration and confidence and I think that’s really valuable… All I know is that when filmmakers come up to me and say I wouldn’t have made that film if I hadn’t been at that event and been really inspired to do it that’s what I know, that’s what I hear. People say they feel supported and feel there’s a network out there and feel confident they can do it. That’s what I know.”

Related Pages

Birds Eye View on DFGdocs - for a full listing of documentary events
Birds Eye View Film Festival

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