The Femme Film Fest heads to Public Space One on Saturday and March 27.
By Alex Kramer | [email protected]
A powerful medium in the modern age of artistic exhibition, cinema lends itself as a tool to bend the ears of audiences. A new Chicago-based movement is doing just that for feminism. The Femme Film Fest, geared toward, around, for, and in support of women in the business, will only showcase films made by people who identify as female.
Inclusion by exclusion, everyone is welcome to watch the screenings at Public Space One, 120 N. Dubuque St., at 7 p.m. Saturday and March 27. The event was also held at the Dollhouse DIY, a Chicago art-performance venue, in February and at the Des Moines Social Club on March 18. The festival is looking into organizing more dates in cities across the Midwest.
The film festival grew out of the curator and filmmaker Serena Fath’s house in Chicago. Fath is a 22-year-old graduate of Columbia College with a B.A. in film and video who spent her freshman year at the University of Iowa studying cinema. She and a few friends started the Dollhouse, one of the only all-female-run DIY spots in Chicago, in the summer of 2013. On her journey into filmmaking, Fath said, she gravitated toward cinema on a whim after seeing a DIY film years ago.
“I really didn’t have any film experience in high school or anything,” Fath said. “Then I was going into college, and I was thinking about what I wanted my major to be, and I saw the movie Tiny Furniture, by Lena Dunham, and it was just like an awakening for me, like ‘Whoa, one person can do all that?’ It was like in her parents’ apartment with her friends acting in it.”
The “very DIY” film from 2010 is about a recent college grad (Dunham) who returns home in the hopes of figuring out what to do with her life. Since then, Fath has collaborated with friends for films with basically no budget.
“I went to film school and noticed that female filmmakers were super underrepresented, even in film school at [my] level, not to mention at the big Hollywood level,” she said. “I decided to do a film screening and call it the Femme Film Fest.”
Fath will show “Catalyst,” a short film about a revolution for free higher education as a backdrop to a queer love story. Ten films total will be shown between the two nights.
Filmmakers found plenty in the art movement taking place in Chicago to inspire them.
“I think Chicago has a really awesome community of young, female creators, and once you hear something through the grapevine or through a friend of yours, you’re definitely down to share your work with whoever wants to see it,” said filmmaker Hannah Welever. “[There is] an obligation to share your work with other people; that’s why you make something, after all.”
The 23-year-old Columbia College graduate in cinematography moved to Chicago in 2010 to begin her film career. She has since worked in all aspects of the process — writing, directing, producing — as well as recently wrapping production on the Netflix show “Easy,” directed by Joe Swanberg.
Welever will screen a short film commenting on the nature of today’s casual age of dating — from hooking up to relationships strictly over phones — through a phone conversation between two queer girls in a pseudo-relationship. It’s called “Playing Games.”
Etched with the markings of this movement, Fath said though there is a vibrant DIY arts community, it’s generally centered on music, not film.
“It’s a really exciting time and place to be an artist in Chicago right now if you’re broke, like all of us are,” she said. “But it’s a different story if you’re a filmmaker. There really isn’t as much of a community of local, underground cinema as there is for other forms of art.”
Screenings such as the Femme Film Fest are helping to change that. Just as Fath’s roots lie in DIY, the festival’s lie within feminism.
“All the work that I do is feminist,” she said. “I’m all about girls helping girls make art. On my films, I try to get as many females as possible to work on my crew because there would be so many times in film school when I would work on a film and I was the only girl in the room — on the crew — who was not an actor.”
Fellow filmmaker Holly Arsenault said feminism has been a defining aspect of her life since high school.
“I was just channeling all of these emotions I felt into something worth fighting for,” she said. “It makes it easier to fight for something when that something is bigger than you, and that’s what feminism is for me, and that’s what all of this work is about in the show.”
New to the scene, Arsenault only recently settled into her love of filmmaking. Before then, her focus was visual arts, including painting and drawing. She will show her “Untitled” at the film fest.
“It’s about dealing with sexual assault and PTSD and trying out this really sort of confrontational, emotional honesty in technique to get my point across,” she said. “Almost all of my work is in some way connected to [feminism]. Or I guess you could say all of it, because I’m making work as a woman. I’m OK with being second to women’s art, to feminist art.”
Emily Esperanza, an eight-year filmmaker based in Chicago showing her and Abby Young’s film “Day/Night,” a two-part film studying nostalgia, anxiety, and femininity, said she feels it is important to shine a light on collections centered on females.
“It’s a very male-dominated industry as it is,” she said. “You have to fight really hard and scream really loudly just to get heard.”
FILM
What: Femme Film Fest
Where: Public Space One, 120 N. Dubuque
When: 7 p.m. Saturday & March 27
Admission: Free