The Female Eye Film Festival (June 3 to 5, National Film Board) Rating: NNN
Rating: NNNNN
Here’s the usual niche-festival blend of shorts and features, documentaries and experiments, but this time, they’re all by women.
The docs are especially good this year. There’s a lot going on in Linda Fitzpatrick’s charming Lynne and Harriet (June 5, 5 pm), in which a recovering urbanite amuses her new neighbours in rural Newfoundland by impulsively adopting a pig, precipitating an inner wrestling match between her nurturing side and her fondness for pork. Go, pork!
And Eylem Kaftan’s Vendetta Song (June 3, 2:15 pm), which made the audience’s top 10 list at Hot Docs this year, is a complex travelogue with a complex agenda. Kaftan, a Turkish-Canadian filmmaker with Kurdish roots, travels to the Kurdish south-east of Turkey in search of the truth about her aunt, allegedly shot in an honour killing years before. She finds herself embraced by a paradoxical culture in which girls can be killed for holding hands while strong women are celebrated for generations in popular songs.
She skirts the equally puzzling paradoxes of Kurdish life under Turkish rule, but they leak in around the edges, adding an extra layer of intricacy to an already thought-provoking film.
