A Cinematic Celebration of International Women’s Day
Saturday, March 8, is International Women’s Day, a globally recognized day set aside to spotlight the diverse achievements of diverse women from diverse places, while simultaneously reminding everyone that there is still more work to be done.
Thanks to Hostelling International, Boston will hold its first annual International Women’s Day Film Festival this year to add a three-day, cinematic flair to the usual celebration. The included films were specifically selected to not only exemplify the “extraordinary lives of women around the world” through their struggles and accomplishments, but also to encourage discussion and introspection.
The film festival opens tonight with Denmark’s Sundance World Cinema Prize-winning documentary Enemies of Happiness, which revolves around 27-year-old Malalai Joya’s campaign to gain one of 249 assembly seats in Afghanistan’s male-dominated parliament. It screens at MCLE (10 Winter Place, Boston) at 7pm, following a 6:30pm reception and preceding a discussion with Joya. Suggested donations are $15.
Tomorrow, the festival continues in Cambridge at Gallery 263 (263 Pearl Street, Cambridge) with The Grace Lee Project, a fun and funny exploration of filmmaker Grace Lee’s intriguing project tracking down numerous women who share her name to see how their lives have shattered the stereotype of what society assumes a typical Korean woman is like. Tickets range from $5 to $9 if purchased in advance and $10 at the door.
Saturday, the final day of the festival, features a variety of film shorts at the Boston Public Library (700 Boylston Street, Copley Square, Boston) in the afternoon, as well as a pair of longer pieces in Cambridge at night. Boston Public Library’s free shorts program begins at 2pm, and it includes the United States’ The Tribe, which is about the Barbie doll and its link to the history of Jewish people; Spain and Senegal’s Binta and the Great Idea, an Academy Award-nominated short film focusing on seven-year-old Binta from Senegal and her fisherman father’s great idea on education; and China’s The Women’s Kingdom, a look at remote southwest China’s Mosuo women, one of the world’s few remaining matriarchal societies.
Two locations host the Cambridge offerings later in the day. The award-winning Mali-United States production This African Life will screen at Gallery 263 (263 Pearl Street, Cambridge) at 5pm. Tickets range from $5 to $9 if purchased in advance and $10 at the door. Through the firsthand experiences of female resident Sokona Keita, the film provides viewers insight into the struggles of women and children in a poor village in West Africa’s Mali.
The final film of the festival is Australia’s My Home — Your War, starting at 7:30pm and presented free at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center (B04, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge). Iraq provides the backdrop as Layla Hassan, an ordinary woman from Baghdad, shares her eye-opening perspective on the Iraq War. A talk and brief discussion with Tahir Albakaa, Iraq’s former Minister of Higher Education and a current visiting scholar at Boston’s Suffolk University, will follow.
For more information on the International Women’s Day Film Festival and purchasing tickets, visit the official website. Interested individuals can also call one central phone number, 617-718-7990 x17, to get information about all of the films scheduled for the event.
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