Our Screening on women’s cinema is dedicated to the German director Helke Sander. This thematic focus wants to deepen the work of women directors and video-artists whose issues are the relationships between genders and women condition in different times and places, often matching the political issues with their artistic proposal. Elke Sander's cinematographic production is strictly connected to her engagement as feminist, involved in women’s rights before and within the emerging 1968 German movement. Through a long political and artistic journey she has uncovered many myths and taboos having to do with women’s issues. She has done so through journalism: in 1974 she founded the journal «Frauen und Film» (Women and Film). She has organized political debates and groups (the most well-known being Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen in 1968 and Brot und Rosen in 1972). Most importantly, between 1971 and 2005 she has realized about twenty movies dealing with the most important issues of the last century: women’s work and lives, women’s individual and social experiences, men’s violence, sexist uses of the media.
Eine Prämie für Irene (A Reward for Irene) is the last of the movies presented in this section. The film focuses on the intersection between the public and the private spheres, through an analysis of the hardships of a young working-class woman trying to combine her work with her family, a problem which is still at the center of many women’s lives. Her first feature film, Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit – Redupers (The All-round Reduced Personality – Redupers), won many awards, among which the prize of the Frauenfilmfestival of Hyères and the Festival of Brussels in 1978). Her movie BeFreier und Befreite (Liberators take liberties), which analyzes the mass rapes that took place in Germany during and at the end of the Second World War and to which Sander has devoted many years of research, has been widely debated. Once it was released, after many producers refused to sponsor it, it spurred an intense discussion and in the United States provoked a series of court cases on the rapes carried out by the Allies during World War II.
Biography
Helke Sander was in Berlino in 1937. After attending a Drama School, she moved to Finland. She worked in theatre and finnish television, she got married and had a child. In 1965 she went back to West Berlin, leaving behind a career and a marriage. She studied at the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie. Since 1967 she was an activist in the students moviment, and in 1968 she founded one of the first femminist groups.
Amongst her films:
1967 Silvo 1967/1968 Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure 1971 Eine Prämie für Irene 1978 Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit 1981 Der subjektive Faktor 1984 Der Beginn aller Schrecken ist Liebe 1985 Aus Berichten der Wach- und Patrouillendienste 1988 Felix 1989 Die Deutschen und ihre Männer 1992 BeFreier und Befreite 1997 Dazlak 2001 Dorf 2005 Mitten im Malestream She also wrote two novels: Die Geschichten der Drei Damen K, published in 1987 and Oh, Lucy, published in 1991.
Helke Sander founded the film review «Frauen und Film» (Women and Film), which has been published for 34 years now. She directed the review for 8 years and wrote several articles. Since 1981 she teached at Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg and she has taught in different European and non European countries.
