You really don’t appreciate how much women have made the documentary genre their own until you go to a film festival like Woods Hole (July 30-Aug. 6), now celebrating its 25th anniversary. Half of the nearly two dozen nonfiction films are directed or co-directed by women, and many of these are about the status of women in far-flung places around the world.
Artist Ai Weiwei may be the face of protest in China, but in Nanfu Wang’s “Hooligan Sparrow,’’ he only makes cameos in the montages of Internet responses to the activism of the Sparrow of the title, Ye Haiyan. Ye’s methods are unorthodox but effective: She brings attention to the plight of sex workers and their customers — exploited workers — by offering to have sex with the latter for free.
Wang catches up with Sparrow as she and a handful of followers protest the lenient charges brought against two school employees who sexually assaulted students. This doesn’t please the powers that be, and Wang, with increasing terror, relates the surveillance, threats, and other methods of corrupt police-state tactics inflicted not just on Ye but on herself as well.
In another instance of a place where women must fight for rights that we often take for granted, Falmouth filmmaker Beth Murphy’s “What Tomorrow Brings’’ visits a small Afghan village where a rare all-girls school struggles to survive in a community uneasy with educating women and in a country where those who teach or learn in such schools are targeted by Taliban terrorists.
Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Prize-winning Pakistani teenager who spoke up for girls’ right to an education and was shot and gravely wounded by the Taliban, doesn’t make an appearance in this film, but is alluded to by the principal, the saintly Razia Jan, as an example. The students, though, have already demonstrated their own courage in asserting their right to learn.
That includes the 15-year-old whose father, the town mayor, threatens to pull her from school and marry her to the 70-year-old father of the 16-year-old girl that he himself plans to marry. It’s just one story line among many in this beautifully shot and compellingly paced film.
At the beginning of Rebbie Ratner’s “Borderline,’’ the film’s subject, Regina, tells her therapist about a confrontation she had with a woman she bumped into on the street. The other woman insulted her. Regina followed the offender to the subway, shouting threats along the way. Later, to reward herself for not physically attacking the person, she gets wasted with Vicodin and wine and sleeps with a 300-pound woman — a complete stranger.
So goes the exhausting life of a sufferer from Borderline Personality Disorder, a combination of manipulativeness, addiction, self-destruction, and uncontrollable emotions. Regina, now 45, also is a very smart, funny, charismatic, and sympathetic character determined to take control of her life. Her illness first manifested itself when she was 5 and attempted suicide. Ratner’s sprightly style — mixing color and black-and-white film, with touches of time-lapse photography and whimsical montages — suits her subject. A feel-good movie true to its feel-bad subject.
www.woodsholefilmfestival.org
Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.
