The 3rd Different Directions Experimental Film Festival will take place at Nun's Island Theatre, Galway from December 10th to 12th. The festival will continue to screen the most challenging works of international experimental cinema, with an emphasis on 16mm. The focus this year will be on Women Filmmakers whose films have maintained a high level of formal and conceptual experimentation.
The history of experimental filmmaking by women has inevitably been fraught with misconceptions and prejudices. Effectively working in a medium in which formal experimentation is often considered the exclusive domain of the maverick male modernist, women have had to establish a complex choreography weaving around the preconceptions associated with their gender; that they tend to focus on the domestic and the personal, that they are limited to a specific concept of the 'body', and that subjectivity and emotionalism are their natural territory.
Different Directions has chosen the work of influential and ground-breaking women filmmakers who defy any clichéd interpretation of their work; from Marguerite Duras and Agnes Varda whose films flow effortlessly between private recollection and elegiac urban poetry, to work by a contemporary artist such as Tacita Dean who has made explicit her debt to Duras; from the visceral materiality of Johanna Vaude and Marylène Negro's provocative and politically confrontational work, to the militant interventions of Carole Roussopoulos and the Zanzibar Group's Jackie Raynal. Our aim is to provide a programme which does justice to the diversity of women's experimental filmmaking.
Different Directions also highlights the radical contribution made by women in collaborative filmmaking partnerships, as they have sometimes been designated as secondary players; Danièle Huillet, Gisèle Meichler, and Raymonde Carasco.
Whilst recognizing and paying homage to women's experimental films, we also wish to avoid the political and philosophical limitations of an essentialism based entirely on gender, and have programmed some complementary films directed by men but displaying an intense engagement with the aesthetic and political problems experienced by women. We are therefore screening Antonioni's Red Desert, Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space, and finally hosting a closing night premiere of Alexander Sokurov's We Need Happiness focussing on women in Kurdish Iraq.
In line with Different Directions previous two festivals, an emphasis will be placed on both challenging our audience and stimulating further discussion on the films screened. To facilitate this, many of the films will be introduced by guest speakers known for their writing on cinema.
For more information visit www.differentdirections.ie
