The 21st annual Women in the Director’s Chair International Film & Video Festival, featuring narrative, documentary, animated, and experimental works by women, runs Friday, March 15, through Sunday, March 24. Screenings are at Preston Bradley Center and WIDC Theater, both at 941 W. Lawrence; Chicago Eagle, 5015 N. Clark; Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State; and Video Machete, 1180 N. Milwaukee. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $8, $6 for students, seniors with a valid ID, and members of Women in the Director’s Chair. Festival passes are also available; for more information call 773-907-0610. Films marked with an * are highly recommended.

Conduction: Heating Up Households

  • Fleshing Out

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Two video documentaries about women who’ve broken into male-dominated sports. Ted Shen writes that True-Hearted Vixens (2000, 57 min.) “profiles a group in their 20s and 30s who joined the Women’s Professional Football League, enticed by its profit-sharing scheme. Mylene Moreno devotes a great deal of time to the nitty-gritty of forming the first two teams–from recruitment to debates over names (the Vixens, the Minxes) to possible sponsorship from Hooters–focusing on two players, a mother who frets about her future and a leader who comes out despite her dislike of the dyke athlete stereotype. Moreno’s approach is PBS standard–lots of talk, presented dully–but there’s enough fresh information to sustain one’s interest.” Fred Camper writes that Laura Plotkin’s Red Rain (1998, 60 min.) “documents the life of boxer Gina ‘Boom Boom’ Guidi. Skillfully intercutting diverse voices with Guidi’s, Plotkin captures the woman’s energy and emotional strength: the oldest child of a single mom, Guidi had to raise three younger brothers and recover from drug and alcohol abuse to become the thoroughly grounded person we see in the film. Though she’s openly lesbian, she argues that her sexuality has nothing to do with her being a boxer, and while she’s mature enough to ignore a homophobic slur from a magazine publisher, she’s clearly hurt by it. Her vulnerability is visible in the ring too, her face registering fear and hesitation as well as aggressiveness.” (WIDC Theater, 6:00)

The myth of the humorless lesbian is effectively exploded by several fine pieces on this program. In Helpless Maiden Makes an “I” Statement (1999) a handcuffed Thirza Jean Cuthand complains from her dungeon to an offscreen mistress: “A couple hours a day would be fun. . . . I can’t be a 24/7 bottom, and I thought I told you that when you kidnapped me.” Cuthand intercuts images of queens and witches from old movies, playfully juxtaposing lesbian B and D with media images of female power. Paula J. Durette’s Ladies Tea is a delightfully dry diagrammatic study of the crowd flow at a Baltimore lesbian bar, with a voice-over explaining, “All the dancing parameters may change if there’s a particularly strong dynamic of ex-girlfriends.” And Dayna McLeod tweaks antiporn academics in Watching Lesbian Porn (2001), with a lecturer talking theory as a couple cavort in the background. Two documentaries are worthwhile as well: the Cincinnati kids in Norah Salmon’s Lesbian Teenagers in High School are impressively knowledgeable and articulate, and in Teresa Cuadra and Suzanne Newman’s Our Health: Latina Lesbians Breaking Barriers (1999) perpetrators and victims of domestic violence describe behavior remarkably similar to that of straight couples. On the same program: work by Jessica King, Moustach Tamar Eylon, Jen Sachs, Sonali Gulati, and Melissa Pearl Friedling. 118 min. (FC) (Preston Bradley Center, 8:00)

Short videos, mostly about people living in the wake of violence. Zoe Roland’s moving From Memory (2001) focuses on nine New Zealanders who fought in Vietnam, carefully orchestrating their voices on the sound track alongside old footage, stills, and mortality statistics to make palpable the ways a past war affects lives in the present. Diane Nerwen also works with multiple voices, in this case American Jews and young Germans talking about their feelings toward contemporary Germany, but her video In the Blood never digests its raw data. Tina M. Bastajian addresses the Armenian genocide in Jagadakeer . . . Between the Near and East (2001), which ranges from the banal (Jeopardy questions on Armenia) to the cryptic (what’s with the belly dancer?). But in the funny and original Cat Lady (2001), Liesel de Boor cleverly edits old home movies to illustrate her grandmother’s tall tale about a pet cat who served in World War II. On the same program, Silent Song by Elida Schogt. 102 min. (FC) (WIDC Theater, 3:00)

In the Dogma 95 documentary Detour to Freedom (2001, 81 min.), Danish filmmaker Sidse Stauholm follows 27-year-old A’a’me Nameth after she’s paroled from an LA jail. She tells all: her confused childhood in Copenhagen, her parents’ broken marriage, her mother’s hippie friends, her and her mother’s imprisonment in Bangkok for drug smuggling, the Englishman who wrote her every week–and who marries her during the production of the video. But watching the minutiae of her new life is like peeking through a Webcam: not much happens, and tedium sets in quickly. Both she and Stauholm play to the camera, seeming not to notice the video crew and pretending surprise at events they must have known about beforehand. On the same program, Laleh Soomekh’s Dear Judge (27 min.), in which the children of a single mother who’s been arrested on a drug charge petition for her release while adjusting to life without her. (TS) (Gene Siskel Film Center, 6:00)