16-21 April. It’s a rainy week in Cologne, with hail in between. The cinema becomes a place of refuge.
This year’s Internationales FrauenFilmfestival takes place in the Filmhaus, Filmforum NRW and Odeon. The festival switches each year between Dortmund and Cologne — it’s Cologne’s turn. In addition to a First Feature competition by female directors, the IFFF also includes sections such as Panorama, Begehrt — which shows queer cinema — and a focus on Rage & Horror accompanied by curator Sara Neidorf from the Berlin Final Girls Festival.
The cinema fills up; interviews with guests and filmmakers are shot; viewers arrive early and exchange thoughts before the films. One thing stands out: while other festivals are virtually only attended by industry representatives wearing their accreditation badges like trophies around their necks, the IFFF presents a true cross-section of society. People want to see these films. Weeks before the festival started one could read WHAT IF(FF) THE FUTURE OF FILM IS FEMALE? on posters and social media. Let’s answer that question and take a look at the program.
Rage and Shoegaze
The first feature competition comprises eight films, from coming-of-age stories to tales of families at the Christmas table to depictions of postnatal trauma.
Three films stood out in particular:
The high-calibre Scrapper (2023) by Charlotte Regan is an Aftersun-ish (Charlotte Wells, 2022) father-daughter story where daddy-issues become the tone of the film. And Lola Campbell’s between-the-lines interpretation of protagonist Georgie. She is the scrapper; angry, filled with rage. A touching film which unfortunately makes reconciliation too easy, reconstructing the classic family picture through narrative inconsistencies.
The Dutch film Melk (Stefanie Kolk, 2023) tells the Sisyphean story of the pregnant Robin, who, after a stillbirth, is now confronted with her loss through the continuing daily production of breast milk. Her odyssey not to throw her milk away, but to donate it, leads her on a grief-laden journey. The displacement and almost revitalisation of vast quantities of milk, to a body that could be her baby, impressively shows how the psyche can function under trauma. A shoegaze-y fable of invisible problems.
Ellbogen (Asli Özarslam, 2024, above), on the other hand, is filled with light and sound. There is just as much discourse bubbling beneath the surface, but Ellbogen manages to initially keep this in the throbbing bass of the party until an accident causes everything to spiral out of control — turning initial euphoria into a nightmare. In the end, Ellbogen wins the 10.000 euro prize.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!