LONDON FEMINIST FILM FESTIVAL

London Feminist Film Festival
17th-20th August 2017

The London Feminist Film Festival is back in August and is pairing up with the BFI to screen The Sealed Soil, the first ever film by an independent Iranian woman director, Marva Nabili, who had to smuggle the film out of 1970s Iran as the revolution unfolded. First screened in the UK in 1977 by the BFI, it tells the story of a young woman who resists patriarchal rule in a small village, and faces social backlash for defying her family’s pressure to get married. LFFF is bringing it back for its 40th anniversary.

LFFF, which starts on 17 August at the RIO CINEMA in Dalston, will open with Talk Back Out Loud (2014), a documentary by Kaori Sakagami that challenges the stigmatisation of HIV-positive women. In the film, charismatic Rhodessa Jones leads The Medea Project, a theatre group that ‘shares the Truth and the stories of what it means to be female and infected or affected’.

One of the themes of this edition of the LFFF is women claiming (male) spaces, like in Where To, Miss? (2015), by Manuela Bastian, the story of an Indian woman who dreams of becoming a taxi driver, or in multinational co-production Ouaga Girls (2017), by Theresa Traore Dahlberg, that follows a group of young women from Burkina Faso studying to become car mechanics.

Nina Hoechtel and Julia Wieger’s documentary essay film Hauntings in the Archive! (2017), a fascinating exploration of the multiple lives of the VBKÖ (the Austrian Association of Women Artists), will have its European premiere at the festival. The filmmakers reconstruct through archival documents and try to reconcile a complex past haunted by the ghosts of racial politics and national socialism, but also of the Women’s Liberation movement and second wave feminism.

A session on ‘Resistance and Survival’ will explore and celebrate women’s global resistance to violence against women and girls (VAWG) through three films that challenge the notions that there is one right way to respond to VAWG and that there is one kind of survivor. A session of short films around the theme of Visibility completes the programme, which also includes panels after every session, with filmmakers, curators and critics and Q&As with the audience.

The programme for the London Feminist Film Festival can be found HERE