20th International Filmmor Women’s Film Festival On Wheels

The 20th International Filmmor Women’s Film Festival on Wheels will take place online between November 5 and December 18, 2022. In its twentieth year, Filmmor brings together vagabond women, who resist and produce in prison, on the street, at war, and in routes of migration; women who say “Woman Life Freedom” in every language; and women’s cinema.

20th Filmmor International Women’s Film Festival started with the motto of Women Make Films in 2002, and has been taking place for 20 years, and has screened 937 films in 65 travelling film festivals. 20th anniversary of Filmmor Women’s Film Festival will be held online on www.filmmoronline.org between November 5 and December 18, 2022.

At the 20th Filmmor, 39 films from 23 countries will meet the audience in the sections of Women’s Cinema, Filmmakers in Jail, Women Life Freedom, Femicide is Preventable, Displaced, Password: Peace, and Feminist Memory.

Despite all sorts of obstacles, hardships, and inequalities, women make cinema. From documentaries to animation, wars to being a single mom in conservative societies, abortion to the adventure of giving birth, they continue to talk about the states of womanhood and the world, their dreams, and experiences.

In the Women’s Cinema section, these films will be available: Flowing Water Carries No Poison, Anima Animae Animam, Antonia, The Guardian, Suspended Wives, Expecting a Grain of Sand, Crazy, Seahorse, Stagnant Water, Yarn, Crotch Stories, Kinka, Where Are You Running to, Nosema, The Ducks, Deaf, Cigarettes, Store Policy.

Following the film screenings, Women Film Gleaners who collect films for Women’s Film Festivals and have been saying, “There are women in cinema, too” since the seventies, will meet at the online forum.

In this section, there are stories of women, who try to cope with war, risk of being arrested due to their thoughts, the multiple facets and violence of forced migration, and the difficulties of being a vagabond; and the films are: Welcomed to Germany?, Incomplete Sentences, This Rain Will Never Stop, Stitching Palestine, Ghostly, Jiyan, Small Life, Along The Way. And the filmmakers who are left without a home, or who consider the place they make film their home, and who speak of being a vagabond meet in the forum of Displaced FilmMakers.

During the struggle of making cinema against all odds, you can also be sentenced to 18 years of imprisonment because of a film you did not make! In the section called Filmmakers in Jail, which is dedicated to filmmaking women that are currently held within four walls, there are films such as Dust Cloth (Toz Bezi) directed by Ahu Öztürk, and co-produced by Çiğdem Mater; Bodies without Soul (Bedensiz Ruhlar) by Sabite Kaya Ekinci who is kept in prison after the enforcement of her punishment has been delayed twice, and Zilname by Mine Özerden, who was sentenced to 18 years of imprisonment at the Gezi court case.

20th Filmmor salutes the Iranian women that resist the mullah regime, flipping their hair in the streets after Jina Mahsa Amini was killed by the moral police because her hair showed, in the Women Life Freedom section. The House is Dark by Furug Feruhzad, who is the pioneer of the New Wave cinema; Our Times by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, which follows women who were in the streets again during the presidential election in 2001; and Mahnaz Mohammadi‘s Sun-Mother; and so, we say: Jin, Jiyan, Azadî!

In this section, we have The Face of Violence, which documents one of the cruelest weapons that men use against women, namely chemical attacks, and Femicide, which challenges the misogynist mentality in the media and the laws in Italy, as well as femicides. This section also includes Femicide is Preventable forum, which brings groups together that fight to keep women and their memories alive, and to be able to be each other’s lifesavers while women are being killed all around the world by men that are closest to them, just because they are women.

A woman who is trying to survive with her child while men are at the war of “sharing the world”, Germany, Pale Mother from Helma Sanders-Brahms; The Day My Father Became a Bush, which conveys the meaninglessness of the war through the eyes of a little girl; and Summerland… So, let’s say this against war, Password: Peace!

This year, in the Feminist Memory section, there is the Suffragette Movement that has not ended for 120 years, with the films: Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema, which we are presenting with the hope to watch the Ottoman “Suffragettes” that seek women’s right to live and vote on the silver screen where the Western Suffragette Movement started to appear; Divine Order, a section from the inspiring story of the women, who brought down the order and gained the right to vote and stand for election, in 1971 in Switzerland. In the forum called 120 Years of Struggle: Women’s Political Representation, women’s experiences from south to north will come together.

The festival will be available through registration on www.filmmoronline.org and reservation for films, which will have Turkish subtitles, starting from November 1. The forums and the talks will be available with Turkish interpretation free of charge, and some of them will also be available on social media.