The Seventh femme totale International Film Festival 1999

10 - 14 March 1999, Dortmund

The next femme totale festival will be taking a look at life's various journeys, detours, crises and little niches. Our focus is on lives in extremis and not on pillar-of-society biographies and straight-arrow résumés (assuming there are such things).

Femme totale's "excursions into biographies" are not meant to present, by looking at great women in history, a new paradigm of history that would make up for past neglect. No, we will be zooming in on the entire versatility and complexity of life itself. The daily struggle to survive, cryptic happiness, megadreams, secret wishes, exile, nostalgia, downshifting, new departures and ambivalent figures. Plus life scenarios from the world of art and the underground. Life lived in "space off", in creative spaces beyond convention.

As we approach the end of the 20th century, life has lost some of its meaning. Personal and political orientation is all the more difficult. Post-1968 political movements - like most women's movements - used to hold up a counterreality to bourgeois existence located somewhere on the edge of the power structure. Even the last remnants of these empowering lifestyles seem to have vanished in the haze and, since the advent of postmodernist and gender theories, concepts such as "male" and "female" are no longer the immutable fixed points of human life as we knew it.

The vexed interplay with the multiple - often contradictory - identities within one and the same person has always been a favourite idea with cinephiles. The cinema likes to dream of enigmatic characters with two (or indeed several) different faces: of Dr Jekyll who, at night, transforms himself into Mr Hyde; or of weird sisters - one good, the other evil, each the spitting image of the other - who like to change places unnoticed.

At the 1999 Festival, the myths and stories of the "western" cinema will be contrasted by the work of Asian directors and video artists from Hong Kong and Japan, for instance. They will be confronting us with unusual identities and startling life designs.

As always, we will be showcasing all kinds of genres, aesthetic forms and formats: grand narrative cinema and experimental video diaries, early silent movies and the interactive media.

Festival spotlights:
Avatar
Life Through the Viewfinder
I got them Old Bag Blues
The Philosophy of On the Way
Just the two of us
Looking for Fumiko: Women Filmmakers in Japan
Lost in music
My brillant career
Spaces Off

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