BY LIZA FOREMAN
SAN SEBASTIAN — Muslim Feminist writer and social reformer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain published Sultana’s Dream in 1905. Spanish filmmaker Isabel Herguera’s big screen adaptation of that story, ten years in the making, has made the competition section at this year’s festival in Spain.
The story evolves in Ladyland, the Feminist utopia Hossain created. There, women are the dominant gender. Crime has been eradicated because all men are locked away. The workday in Ladyland spans two hours because in the traditional workday, men smoked for at least six hours. Labor-less farming and flying cars are part of Hossain’s futuristic universe where female scientists have also worked out how to control the weather.
The film’s beautiful imagery, devoid of action heroes, SFX and guns, is based on the author’s drawings, which include traditional Indian Mehndi skin art. Using highly creative artistry, these Indian tattoos are turned into a style of animation to beautifully help tell the story.
When Herguera saw the San Sebastian premiere in a high-tech movie theater earlier this week, she says the film felt out of place. “It felt as if the theater were designed to accommodate those other types of films instead.
“I felt very distanced from the film seeing it in that theater,” she added. “I felt like that sort of theater needs action films, but something intimate like Sultana’s Dream … I don’t know.”
Herguera says she has been “in a tunnel for ten years” completing the film and she has “not paid much attention to recent box office trends.” But now the film is out, she’s hoping the story makes a mark in the spirit of its activist author.
“I know that Barbie was released, and it was like Ladyland, and I know of other films leading with gender, but I’ve been buried. I grew up with John Ford and very male director films as a child, and these imprinted my imagination. There are female directors like (the late) Chantal Akerman and Claire Denis, but I find it’s probably not enough. It’s a completely different view of things or approach of storytelling. The female. There are different movements physically. It’s something I miss. We need more. It’s a matter of time.”
San Sebastian is doing its part to usher in more change for women filmmakers. Five years ago, the festival signed a gender parity accord. And this is the fourth year it will be issuing a report on parity at the festival.
In 2023, seven of the first or second-time fiction feature film helmers in competition are women, and many have female-centric films.
These include Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, focusing on black women in the southern USA. Producer Adele Romanski said at the press conference that the film, “Gives a much needed space to tell the truth of black women.”
Other subjects by female directors covered in official selection include women’s reproductive rights in rural Galicia, in Jaione Camborda’s The Rye Horn.
The festival has also put the spotlight on female filmmakers from Latin America in its Horizontes Latinos sidebar.
Eight of the 12 features in the program are by female directors.
Titles include Argentine filmmaker Paula Hernández’ A Ravaging Wind, a big-screen adaptation of Selva Almada’s eponymous novel, which opened the sidebar. It tells the story of a preacher and his daughter whose car breaks down on their latest mission to spread the word of the Gospel.
Carolina Markowicz returns to the section with her second feature film, Pedágio / Toll, that will close the sidebar.
The festival’s third gender parity report in 2022 stated that the festival is, “finding it increasingly necessary to expand upon and examine new realities from this angle.”
Last year’s analysis was broadened to include an examination of parity in round tables, film talks, master classes and the juries, as well as in the category of sound. According to last year’s report, except for the Nest section, the percentage of women professionals responsible for sound in films is, on average, less than 25 percent.
While a film helmed by a woman won the Golden Shell prize for the third consecutive year in 2022, the study showed that the stats have not changed much for women in the last four years.
There is a ratio of one-third authorship by women and two-thirds by men, found across the different professional categories and sections at the festival. However, there have been some positive changes since the study began.
In the New Directors section, women cinematographers have risen in number from between 15 and 20 percent to 33 percent.
In the section Horizontes Latinos, that figure has risen to 31 percent.
Last year, parity was reached in the Basque productions selected with respect to directing, screenwriting, editing and production, and there are more women composers than men.
The study also indicates that the Perlak, Culinary Zinema and Made in Spain Sections all fall below average in the participation of women professionals.
An Equality Plan to help balance the involvement of women in the film industry is in the works. To that end, the Festival is working with the collectives making up the Interterritorial Workgroup on Equality in Audiovisual Media 50/50 by 2025 (GTI) and CIMA, the Association of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media.
