The Ordinary Lives of Women Film programme, curated by Nicole Bearman
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The Ordinary Lives of Women Film programme, curated by Nicole Bearman
Day 1 | Friday, 4th March, 2022, 9pm
Vivian’s Garden (2017)
by Rosalind Nashashibi (imwielda fl-1973)
30min
Vivian’s Garden is a thirty-minute colour film with sound that depicts the relationship between two Swiss /Austrian émigré artists who are mother and daughter – Elisabeth Wild (born 1922) and Vivian Suter (born 1949). The film was shot and is set in the connected houses the two women share in a jungle garden in Panajachel, Guatemala, where they have developed a matriarchal compound in an environment that seems to be a site of both refuge and fear. The home and garden are places of terror as well as healing, and the film outlines how, for example, a recent problem with a criminal neighbour caused the pair to be under curfew and threats, while catastrophic floods, kidnappers and fear of intruders are ever-present. On the other hand, they lead an idyllic life, making art in beautiful surroundings, living simply, being taken care of and taking care of each other. Vivian’s Garden exists in an edition of three, the first of which is in the collection of the Tate. It was first shown at Documenta 14 in both Athens and Kassel in 2017.
Become A Microscope: 90 Statements on Sister Corita (2014)
by Aaron Rose
23min
Sister Corita (1918-1986) was a teacher, political activist and possibly one of the most innovative and unusual pop artists of the 1960’s. Become A Microscope: 90 Statements on Sister Corita, directed by Aaron Rose is a 20-minute documentary film shot on location in 2009 on the campus of Immaculate Heart in Los Angeles where Corita taught. Subjects include many of her contemporaries and former students. The film serves as a living, breathing document of the inspiration she spread to so many people throughout her life…and as the title suggests, the importance of looking at the world “small pieces at a time”.
Director Aaron Rose is an artist, curator and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. His past films include Beautiful Losers, Hamburger Eyes and Portraits of Braddock.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
by Lily Amirpour
1hr 40min
A 2014 American Persian-language horror Western film written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour. Promoted as “The first Iranian vampire Western”, it stars Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Mozhan Marnò, Marshall Manesh, and Dominic Rains. It was financed in part by a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night takes place in “the Iranian ghost-town Bad City” and depicts the doings of “a lonesome vampire”. It was filmed in Taft, California, in black-and-white. It was chosen to show in the “Next” program at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.
Day 2 | Saturday, March 5, 2022, 5pm
Hidden (2020)
by Jafar Panahi
18min
Jafar Panahi’s short follows him, his daughter and her theater-producer friend to a remote Kurdish village to visit a woman, a preternaturally gifted singer, whose traditional family refuses to allow her to perform publicly. What they find is a secret to be kept hidden, but yearning to break free.
The Time that Remains (2012)
by Soda Jerk
12min
In this gothic melodrama, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis perpetually wake to find themselves haunted by their own apparitions and terrorized by markers of time. Isolated in their own screen space, each woman struggles to reclaim time from the gendered discourses of ageing that conflate older women with a sense of invisibility and expiration.
The Time that Remains is the third work in Soda Jerk’s ongoing series of Séance Fictions, a cycle of films concerned with corporeal experiences of time, and how these relations are mediated by screen technologies. Each work in this series stages an encounter between the past and future selves of a deceased screen star.Soda Jerk is a 2-person art collective that works exclusively with pirated cinema to make experimental narrative films. Following their political revenge fable TERROR NULLIUS (2018), Soda Jerk will premiere their new feature Hello Dankness in 2022.
HAUS 209 (House 209) (2016)
by Bettina Hutschek
9.55min
HAUS 209 (House 209) tells the story of a woman who is used in a dystopian experiment of travelling to the “world beyond”. The woman is a prisoner in a clinic in a crisis-torn country. Scientists research the possibility of travelling to the “other world” with the help of radioactive capsules. Test subjects are sent to the “beyond” to get advice from the “voices” of how to solve humanity’s problems.
The film is constructed of still photos from various stays at the HELIOS-clinic for radioactive iodine therapy after thyroid cancer, of found footage from the 1950s, and of microscopic images of cells and inner-body activity. Sound recordings from the interior of the clinic ward mix with electronic blips and beeps, with Geiger-counter clicks and excerpts of songs by Debussy. The film refers to Marker’s “La Jetée”, while the film’s title refers to the ward in the clinic Berlin Buch, where thyroid cancer patients are given their radioactive iodine therapy.
Girlfriends (1978)
by Claudia Weill
1hr 26min
When her best friend and roommate abruptly moves out to get married, Susan (Melanie Mayron), trying to be an artist while making ends meet as a bar mitzvah photographer on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, finds herself adrift in both life and love. A wonder of American independent cinema by Claudia Weill (who, when she was admitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a director in 1981, was one of only four women ever to have received that honor), Girlfriends is a remarkably authentic vision of female relationships that has become a touchstone for makers of an entire subgenre of films and television shows about young women trying to make it in the big city. This 1970s New York time capsule captures the complexities and contradictions of women’s lives and relationships with wry humor and refreshing frankness.
