Zones of Conflict: Feminist Activism & Women’s Filmmaking in Transformative Times

by: Hester Baer & Angelica Fenner , October 5, 2023

The Berlin Film Festival has long served as a key site for advocacy on behalf of gender equality and diversity in film. Already in the 1970s and 1980s, feminist activists used the Festival platform to advocate for equitable access to funding for women filmmakers as part of a long-standing campaign for a gender quota in the German film and television industries. This campaign was then revitalised by a new generation of feminists in the 2010s, when the organisation Pro Quote Film took up the work of lobbying, publicity, and protest, using the opportunities for international dialogue and cooperation afforded through the Festival to pursue broad-based transformation. While progress toward equity has been slow and incremental, feminist activism has helped to nurture infrastructures of support for women’s filmmaking in Germany, giving rise to important aesthetic and political developments. Yet the Festival itself, despite historically serving as a locus for activism, has only recently begun to attend to broad-based demands for equity by explicitly fostering a more inclusive program in terms of the films selected for exhibition.

While the Festival’s numbers fluctuate from year to year, 2019 posed a banner year for women filmmakers in terms of sheer quantity, with a whopping 41% of films in the competition directed by women. In turn, at the 73^rd Berlinale in February 2023—the first, full-scale in-person festival since the COVID-19 pandemic—it was evident that the mission to diversify filmmaking continues to yield results, especially when it comes to gender. Of the 221 new films exhibited at the 2023 Festival, 97 were directed by women (38.5%) and 10 by nonbinary people (4%). The competition numbers were similar, with 6 of 19 competition films directed by women and 3 by nonbinary individuals. Perspektive Deutsches Kino, which features new films from Germany, achieved a 50/50 balance, with 4 women-directed films, 4 men-directed films, and 2 gender-balanced co-directed films. Attention to equity and diversity is also filtering into cinematic narratives, which evidence a wider range of representations than ever before, including of trans* and nonbinary people, older women, and others who have been historically excluded from the screen.

As one of the ‘Big Five’ film festivals in the world, the Berlinale serves as a seismograph of contemporary cinema. Based on our observations of the 2023 Festival, this article takes stock of a moment characterised by transformation and conflict. While activists are seizing new opportunities opened up by the paradigm shifts of recent years—including sustained attention to gender equity in the politics and economics of film production, distribution, and exhibition—the situation for Black and PoC filmmakers at the Berlinale and beyond has not improved to the same degree. The intensification of global conflicts and the outbreak of new wars have posed unique problems for filmmakers, especially women, hailing from the affected areas. At the same time, the conflicts generated by the global pandemic have left their imprint on the aesthetic form and thematic content of films that gestated over the past three years and are now premiering. In what follows, we elaborate these transformations from the point of view of, respectively, organisational infrastructure and networking; artistic and activist trajectories among women in geographical zones of acute crisis; and a sampling of recent German films featured at the Berlinale.

Cultivating the Power to Transform Global Film Culture

The feminist think tank Power to Transform! was founded in 2021 to facilitate gender equity and diversity, specifically by developing connections between academic researchers and practitioners in the political and cultural spheres. Building on their previous work with Pro Quote Film, co-founders Barbara Rohm and Yvonne de Andrés have set about expanding this advocacy work under the premise that it is through networking and mentoring across cultural and national borders that resources, knowledge, and skills can best be pooled and made available to the largest number of people, including in regions where financial resources, infrastructure, and training may be scarce. Building on the videoconferencing platforms that popularised live-streamed virtual gatherings during the pandemic, their NGO launched the online series ‘Power Mornings,’ held from 8:20-9:20 a.m. and enabling people working from home to jumpstart the day with a stimulating talk. Past episodes have included communications scholar Christine Linke reporting from her study on gender-based violence in German television; journalist and author Rebekkah Endler reading from Das Patriarchat der Dinge—Warum Frauen die Welt nicht passt (A Patriarchy of Things—Why The World Doesn’t Fit Women), (2021) on how man-made design shapes women’s lives; and political scientist and activist Emilia Roig on her recent book, Why We Matter: Das Ende der Unterdrückung (Why We Matter: The End of Oppression), (2021). In the lead up to the 2023 Berlin Film Festival, Power to Transform! also hosted an online masterclass, ‘Intimacy Coordinating and Safe Contact Officers as Best Practices,’ and a screening and Q&A with Nina Menkes about her 2022 documentary feature Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power.

At the Festival itself, de Andrés and Rohm hosted a global forum for feminist film organisations under the banner ‘Power for Change.’ The festival atmosphere of cautious elation at returning to in-person gatherings and interactions was further amplified at the global forum by the buoyant positivity circulating in a hall filled with attendees hailing from different countries and cultures and each dedicated to social change in their local context. Funding was jointly secured from Germany’s Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth together with the Canadian Embassy, which made available their event space on Potsdamer Platz. In her welcoming remarks, Canadian Counsellor for Public Affairs Andrea Meyer spoke of a feminist foreign policy, in which gender equality and human rights are central elements, and of cultural diplomacy as a means to honour different points of view and, in the case of film, to render visible what cannot be fully captured in words alone. German Minister Lisa Paus, a trained economist, pointed to the chilling national statistic that every third day a woman is killed by her partner in Germany, where every third woman has experienced sexual violence. Thus, the gendered struggles in other parts of the world are mirrored within the country’s own borders, because patriarchy is the problem, predicated as it is on the assumption that men govern women’s bodies. Moreover, in the German film industry, 75% of film directors are men. Certainly, there are more women throughout the industry now, but they continue to work under poorer conditions and to earn on average 40% lower wages (compared to a national average of 18% less for women workers across all sectors of employment). The Transparency in Wage Structures Act has been an important intervention, one now also applicable for companies with less than 200 employees, of which there are many in the cultural sector.

A theme echoed throughout the Global Forum was the urgent need for broader perspectives, especially those that are inventive and courageous in finding ways to overcome fierce competition in order to bring a more cooperative approach to the table. In this context, the German Ministry is aiming to meet its target next year for 50% of leadership positions to be occupied by women by 2024. In her own opening remarks, Barbara Rohm observed that the reason the film industry lacks confidence in women’s participation is due to risk aversion—an unwillingness to dedicate airtime to new perspectives and an absence of trust in the professionalism of previously marginalised groups and their capacity to manage large budgets. The male gaze, she added, is in the DNA of the film industry, involving sexualisation of images and stereotyping. This violence occurs both behind and in front of the camera but is also built into the competitive infrastructures of access and programming in the neoliberal age, when even the pleasures of cooking have been transformed into competition for prize money. This pervasive mentality has led to a scarcity consciousness prevailing over resources, perspectives, and storytelling structures. Abundance, by turns, may be found by listening to ‘soft’ voices, those that do not have the resources to be brash, imposing, and unilateral in their focalisation.

Women Filmmakers in Global Conflict Zones

While in 2020, women representatives from indigenous film initiatives around the world had been present to share their strategies and struggles, this year, women filmmakers from three zones of heightened geopolitical conflict spoke about their perspectives. Two Ukrainian filmmakers discussed the challenges of continuing to generate films that represent both suffering and survival in Ukraine in the lead up to the present moment. Christina Tynkevich’s feature film How is Katya? (2022) includes two supporting female lead protagonists and tells the story of a physician in Ukraine who experiences the unexpected death of her daughter. In audience discussions around the world this director has had to field the recurring query whether the film is a critique of men. As Tynkevich put it, why should a film focusing on women protagonists—a focalisation the director adopted because she is herself female-identified—be assumed inherently exclusionary, even as mainstream storytelling featuring male lead characters is attributed an ungendered point of view? Tynkevich noted that prior to the Russian war of aggression, the Ukrainian State Film Fund was the primary access point, with little commercial funding nor attention to equity, but now all sources have been frozen for the indefinite future. The industry has shrunk to 10% of its former size and capacity, and funding from abroad faces logistical obstacles in reaching Ukrainian banks. Life continues in some fractured fashion, but what will students at university do with their degrees? Film school graduates will have to go abroad to pursue their profession.

Director and screenwriter Maryna Er Gorbach left Ukraine for Turkey as early as 2009 in order to be able to make films on behalf of her culture and country. Her feature Klondike premiered at Sundance, where it secured a top prize; it also screened at the 2022 Berlinale and was Ukraine’s 2023 Oscar nominee. Shot in Odessa during the pandemic, the film’s plot circles around expecting parents living in the Donetsk province of eastern Ukraine, a disputed territory near the Russian border. The story builds the premise that the Russian war began earlier, in 2014, when Russian missiles shot down the Malaysian Airlines flight MH117 in the Donbas region— coincidentally on Er Gorbach’s birthday—escalating tensions between separatists and Ukrainian-identifying residents. Klondike also screened at sold-out theatres in Ukraine in October 2022 despite the ongoing missile strikes. Er Gorbach points to the more recent introduction of Iranian-manufactured drones, which have escalated the dangers to civilians. She emphasised the strength and courage of her people, mentioning that she never cries when she is in Ukraine because her attention is fully focused on helping and cooperating with others working on the ground.

Both parallels and differences across national borders emerge in the struggles faced by Iranian women directors. Pune Parsafar’s documentary Cheers to Iranian Women (2022) could only be made in London, where Parsafar has lived in exile, pursuing a practice-based PhD in Documentary Media that provided her the resources and facilities to shoot, edit, and produce her film. Prompted by her sense that the depiction of women in feature films endorsed by the Iranian censors did not correlate with her own experiences and those of other Iranian women, her documentary features interviews with women involved in social and political activism in Iran on behalf of women’s rights, against stoning and execution, and redressing the situation of families who have lost members to long-term imprisonment. Given how nationality can render us complicit by association with state policies we do not endorse, Parsafar made a point of acknowledging how unfortunate it was that Iran was selling drones to Russia, calling for solidarity across borders against gender oppression. She also pointed out that, while the war in Ukraine is one between nations and cultures, in Iran a misogynist war on women is being carried out in very explicit ways, severely circumscribing their spatial movement, bodily visibility, and freedom of expression.

Rokhasareh Ghaemmaghami started making films in Iran in 2000 but has been living abroad since 2017. She indicates that filmmakers in Iran strive to make the films they intended, but only to a certain threshold where they can still avoid imprisonment and be allowed to produce their next film. In order to make documentary films like Ghaemmaghami’s Sunita, which won World Documentary and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2016, one has to leave the country. Funding is dire: for 40 years, no one has been permitted to accept money from abroad, and if the State discovers that a filmmaker has nonetheless received funds, they stand at risk of execution. Ghaemmaghami sometimes had relatives send cash smuggled in luggage on visits into the country, in hopes it would not be detected and confiscated. All the same, her own passport was taken from her for screening a film about a schizophrenic artist on BBC Iran. Eventually, she was able to flee to the US and then to Germany, where she finds it much easier to make films, maintaining that in the US one faces the contradictory task of soliciting affluent producers to fund films that are criticising the very economic system—i.e. capitalism—from which those producers directly benefit. A solid Iranian network of filmmakers abroad has managed to isolate the state film industry by refusing—in coordination with filmmakers and actors within the country—to submit their films to festivals in Iran. As a result, the state has resorted to hiring audiences to come watch those few films that do still screen in an effort to demonstrate that festivals are still running.

Afghan screenwriter and filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat, by turns, regards herself not as an activist but an artist, one whose work has been compared to that of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Raised in central Afghanistan, she moved to Kabul in 2008 to intern with film faculty there, making first a documentary before shifting to fiction. But the Taliban, the patriarchal mafia that controlled political, economic, cultural, and religious spheres, made working as a filmmaker impossible for a young woman director. Sadat’s short film Yeke Varune (Vice Versa), (2011) was repeatedly rejected at Afghan festivals, only to finally land at the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, which secured her an opportunity for further training in Paris. Although she believes in a future for Afghanistan, Sadat has found it challenging both there and abroad to make the films of her choosing, if for differing reasons. When she received funding from abroad for Wolf and Sheep (2016), the producers and team declined to shoot in Afghanistan because it was too dangerous, so she found herself scouting locations in Tajikstan and facing bureaucratic hurdles in acquiring visas for dozens of cast and staff members and overseeing their paperwork with various embassies. Since Afghanistan’s collapse in 2021, Sadat has moved to Hamburg where she has been trying to make a romantic comedy. Funders, however, expect a film about her country of origin and that is not necessarily the specific narrative she is interested in pursuing. Although she had not previously cultivated extensive professional links within Afghanistan, with the flight of so many filmmakers since 2021 she is hopeful that a network can emerge abroad in the coming decade. Similarly, in Ukraine and Iran, these networks are key to enabling storytelling from abroad while also channelling assistance to those striving to do the same from within these conflict zones.

Conflict and Transformation in Post-Pandemic German Cinema

As oppressive structures begin to fracture, and those invested in maintaining control resort to ever more desperate measures, conflict has become almost omnipresent in a contemporary moment exacerbated by the stress and losses of the Covid-19 pandemic. While German co-productions have helped finance films that bring attention to these aggravated circumstances abroad, domestic productions have also been responsive to changing times. Two developments were palpable among the German films screened in Berlin: a pandemic-driven interrogation of isolation and enclosure, in stories that evince the new forms of community facilitated by seclusion, as well as the psychic duress it entails; and narrative attention to broadening representational inclusivity.

Five German films screened in competition in 2023, three by women directors and two by men. Stalwart German auteur Margarethe von Trotta’s latest in a series of biopics of famous women, Ingeborg Bachmann—Reise in die Wüste (Ingeborg Bachmann—Journey into the Desert), focuses on the conflicted final years of the celebrated feminist writer, who travelled to Egypt in 1964 with her friend and acolyte Adolf Opel, hoping to escape the violent jealousy of her fellow writer and lover Max Frisch. The film focuses on how the trip opened up fruitful new artistic pathways for Bachmann, although these were left unrealised by her early death. Berlin-born French-Iranian director Emily Atef’s slow-burning romance Irgendwann werden wir uns alles erzählen (Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything) takes place in an isolated East German village in 1990 following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and allegorises the period of new beginnings via a young woman who forsakes her boyfriend for a passionate and violent affair with a much older lover. Conventional historical dramas, these films probe the situation of women in periods of social change, examining how the stultifying nature of heteropatriarchal relations forecloses upon the opportunities such transformations appear to open up.

Although three of the films in competition were directed by filmmakers associated with the Berlin School, the diversity of their approaches to style and genre places continued pressure on the coherency of this label. Angela Schanelec’s stunning, formally rigorous Music, which won the Silver Bear for best screenplay, perhaps reflects most closely the aesthetic approach associated with Berlin School films as evidenced by its affectless acting, eschewal of continuity, minimalist editing, and elliptical story. Loosely based on the Oedipus myth, Music—whose title reflects its attention to both indie pop and especially classical baroque music as forms of emotional expression—aptly considers the precarity of life and the limits of human control over the (often violent) events that befall us. Christian Petzold’s Roter Himmel (Afire), a kind of environmental tragicomedy that won the Grand Jury Prize, also explores human agency and vulnerability in a narrative that explicitly envisions the effects of climate change on a group of young people whose lives are threatened by forest fires encroaching on the vacation home where they are staying on the Baltic coast. Like many films screened at this year’s Berlinale, Afire explores interpersonal dynamics among individuals confronted with an external threat and makes visible how a blanket assault to unexamined privilege like the one posed by global warming exacerbates racism, misogyny, and homophobia. A very different kind of film, but one that is also concerned with the costs of both internalised oppression and external forms of subjugation, Christoph Hochhäusler’s Bis ans Ende der Nacht (Till the End of the Night) follows gay cop Robert and his trans* informant Leni, who has been released from jail early to collaborate in an undercover operation aiming to infiltrate an internet drug ring. A mash-up of Fassbinder’s queer aesthetics and the genre markers of the TV crime drama, Hochhäusler’s film is part of a new wave of trans* representation in evidence at this year’s festival. Both acting prizes went to performers portraying trans* people: the Silver Bear for best leading performance to the child actor Sofia Otero for her role in the Spanish film 20.000 especies de abejas (20,000 Species of Bees), directed by Estabaliz Urresola Solaguren, and the supporting award to Thea Ehre, herself a transwoman, for her role in Till the End of the Night.

The focus on social and interpersonal conflicts taking place in secluded or closed off spaces that characterised so many of this year’s films certainly results from the production constraints imposed by the pandemic, which made shooting in multiple locations difficult and required complex measures to prevent infections on set. The winner of the Golden Bear for best film, the French documentary Sur l’Adamant (On the Adamant), directed by Nicolas Philibert, for example, focuses on a houseboat floating on the Seine that serves as a care centre for adults in psychiatric treatment. Many of the most compelling narratives premiering this year made a virtue of these constraints, limiting location shoots but pushing the boundaries of cinematic representation in other ways. German director İlker Çatak’s feature Das Lehrerzimmer (The Teacher’s Room) takes place almost entirely inside a secondary school, where an idealistic young teacher is shocked by the racism of her colleagues and must slowly come to terms with her own unexamined privilege after a series of thefts causes havoc in the school. Figured as a microcosm of social conflicts in the present—including the problematic premise of ‘integration’ in a migration society, the white saviour complex, and cancel culture—The Teacher’s Room casts a critical gaze on questions of diversity in contemporary Germany.

Taking place on an island and exploring how alternative communities may foster new forms of identity, Frauke Finsterwalder’s Sisi & Ich (Sisi & I) follows Irma Gräfin von Sztáray (Sandra Hüller) as she arrives on Corfu to serve as a lady-in-waiting to Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Fondly known—to her intimates, to Austro-Hungarian subjects during her reign (1854-1898), and to cinema audiences ever since—as Sisi, the Empress (here played by Susanne Wolff) is ensconced in her summer residence on the island. Irma, who refuses to marry and doesn’t conform to gender expectations at court, is a nascently queer character and thus a good match for the job, if she can only learn to curb her rather enthusiastic appetites. In order to maintain her notorious hourglass figure, Sisi spends her time on Corfu imbibing laxative teas and a variety of herbal tinctures, some of them laced with cocaine, while also undertaking acrobatic workouts and robust hikes—all of which Irma must adapt to. But there is also entertainment in the form of sexual escapades, fancy-dress parties, and gender-bending theatrical performances, filmed in lush colour with vibrant costumes and a vividly decorated mise-en-scene.

Sisi, who was memorably embodied by Romy Schneider in the classic 1950s trilogy of Sissi films directed by Ernst Marischka, has experienced a screen renaissance of late. The RTL series Sissi, starring the Swiss actress Dominique Devenport, premiered in 2021 and is now in its third season, while Netflix’s Die Kaiserin (The Empress), starring the Turkish-German actress Devrim Lingnau, was among the top-ten most-watched non-English-language series on the streaming service in 2022 and has been renewed for a second season. Finsterwalder’s Sisi & Ich, which premiered at the Berlinale, follows on the heels of Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, starring the Luxembourg-born German actress Vicky Krieps, which debuted at Cannes in 2022.

Sisi & Ich and Corsage share in common a vision of the Empress as a queer-feminist prototype: both films employ anachronism (most obviously in soundtracks that feature contemporary pop music and remixed classic rock songs) in order to reboot Sisi’s story for the twenty-first century. Finsterwalder’s film, as told through the eyes of Irma, puts a comic lens on Sisi, thoroughly draining her oft-told story of the melodramatic qualities with which it has long been associated and re-signifying it as a transformative tale of women’s quest to articulate their own desires relative to the constraints and the powers of representation—in both political and aesthetic terms. In Sisi & Ich, the Empress escapes the representational demands placed on her by life at court and by her husband Franz Josef by withdrawing to the isolated terrain of Corfu where, together with her entourage, she pursues an experiment in alternative worldmaking.

Certainly, the resurgence of Sisi as a prominent screen character for the 2020s derives from renewed attention to the urgency of centring stories about women, gender-nonconforming, and queer characters, in light of feminist activism on behalf of diversifying participation and representation in the global film industries. Sisi offers a template for critical engagement with heteronormativity, beauty standards, and ideals of femininity, both in history and on screen, and it is notable that, whereas Schneider was a teenager when she performed in the 1950s-era Sissi films, Corsage and Sisi & Ich star Krieps and Wolff, thereby expanding opportunities to one of the least represented groups in feature filmmaking: women over 35.

Even amid the diversity evident at the 2023 Berlinale, certain films were not free of controversy, with three singled out by the organisation Schwarze Filmschaffende (Black Artists in German Film) as injurious in their portrayal of People of Colour. The organisation, a network of Black film creatives from German-speaking Europe with and without a migratory background, decried the implicit blackfacing in the Norwegian film Just Super (dir. Rasmus Siverten) and the use of public German and European funding to support two films that were, in turn, nominated by the German Film Academy for inclusion in the festival. Both films focalised aspects of colonial history through white male intellectual figures, respectively the ancient philosopher Lucius Seneca and the fictional ethnologist Alexander Hoffmann, in a manner that may arguably reinscribe the very violence the narratives purport to expose and critique. The German-Moroccan coproduction Seneca—On the Creation of Earthquakes (dir. Robert Schwenke), framed as a dark comedy starring John Malkovich and Geraldine Chaplin, includes violent depictions of Black youth slaughtered in ancient Roman times at the cusp of emperor Nero’s despotic regime. The Measure of Man (dir. Lars Kraume), by turns, revisits German Southwest Africa, present day Namibia, where German occupiers carried out a genocide against the Herero and Nama populations between 1884 and 1915.

Schwarze Filmschaffende decried what they perceived as an inadequate effort to rectify poor judgement in festival programming. Despite cancelling the premiere of Just Super, for example, subsequent screenings in the Generations section continued with warnings advising viewer discretion due to depictions offensive to historically marginalised communities. Certainly, any potential missteps would ideally be stemmed at the earliest stage of conceiving a project before its realisation as finalised film. When these are not recognised early on and a film manages to land at festivals nonetheless, the challenge lies in how to render the situation instructive; is cancellation the only solution, or can a film’s screening and discussion in such instances serve a learning process for how not to (mis)represent those who have experienced past harm? Controversies such as this one can best be rendered productive if they inspire concerted reflection and future transformations in policy. Thus, the authors of the public statement later drew up 17 demands relating to the governance structure of the Berlinale, including incorporation of minorities within the feature film jury to ensure greater sensitivity to potentially damaging screen depictions, as well as the establishment of a task force against racism and discrimination in film to flag problematic content, and further, the drafting of a mission statement for the festival that includes Diversity and Inclusion.

It remains to be seen how future iterations of the Berlinale will reflect attention to these demands. The recently announced appointment to the Berlinale Selection Committee of Berlin-based African cinema expert Jacqueline Nsiah, previously a co-curator of “Fiktionsbescheinigung”—a special programme screening the work of BIPOC filmmakers in Germany—represents one step toward inclusivity. Meanwhile, due to the implementation of austerity measures, Festival directors Mariëtte Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian revealed in July 2023 that two sections with a focus on German cinema and media—Perspektive Deutsches Kino and Berlinale Series—will be dissolved altogether, and that the 2024 Berlinale will screen nearly one-third less films than have been shown in recent years. The potential impact on German cinema—its makers, the industry as a whole, and the culture of its reception—seems quite sobering and prompts the open-ended question of how, if not within their own country of origin, German made and co-produced films will continue to gain the visibility they sorely need and deserve.