Seeing the World at the Female Eye Film Festival
The Female Eye Film Festival continues tonight with a feature documentary at 6pm entitled The Boxers. The American documentary follows a group of amateur female boxers as they train to compete internationally, focusing on their fights outside the ring as well as inside. For more tips on what not to miss at the festival this weekend, read on.
The major feature film tonight is the Swiss/German production, Fraulein. The film follows three different women from the former country of Yugoslavia who now live in Switzerland, exploring their feelings of displacement and their relationships. As director Andrea Staka explains, she also wanted to explore the country of Switzerland, specifically Zurich; a beautiful city with vast multiculturalism which can also seem cold and divided. Fraulien will be screened tonight at 10pm at Canada Square.
But don't stay up too late tonight, because the festival begins bright and early with the Directors Panel at 11am, which will be followed by a screening of the short film Cargo and the Oldest Basketball Team in the World. The latter is a film about a female basketball team competing in a tournament as the oldest team registered, the average age of their teammates being a lively 72! The film was recently reviewed by NOW magazine where the only complaint to be found was that the film (running at 48 minutes) was too short.
While 11am seems early for a film screening on a Sunday, it's the only way to ensure that you will also be awake for the following documentary at 1pm, The Cats of Mirikitani. (Which some may have seen at Doc Soup in November of 2006.) The film follows 80 year old Jimmy Mirikitani, a Japanese man who survived internment camps in WWII, the destruction of Hiroshima and most recently, homelessness. The cause for Jimmy's survival was found in his desire to make peace and art, not war. The real heart of the documentary is the relationship between director Linda Hattendorf and Jimmy, as she tries to reunite him with family and get him social services, learning his surprising history at the same time. The Cats of Mirikitani can be seen Sunday March 30th at 1pm.
The festival has several other screenings tomorrow which can be found in detail on their website. The closing night film tomorrow is The World Unseen based on the novel the same name, about how South Asians were targeted during the South African apartheid in the 1950s and about two women who fall in love. The film was also featured at TIFF this past year. To round up the festival, a closing night party will follow The World Unseen at approximately 8:30pm at Alleycatz jazz lounge.
Image: Fraulein from DasFraulien.ch
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