Museum Film Festival Appeals to Fresh Audience

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of its founding, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., is mounting a Festival of Women’s Film and Media Arts this week, with filmmakers from 47 countries.

It’s a departure for the museum, which was the brainchild of Wilhelmina Cole Holladay and whose 1987 opening was carried out, in the views of a Washington Post art critic at the time, with “a sort of Junior League gentility.” It has gotten much edgier—yes, including showing Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party”—but the film festival is a bid to get an entirely new generation of women to pay attention to the privately funded museum.

Judging by interviews with a dozen women who came Tuesday to the opening night of the six-day festival, that goal is on target. “I’d been interested in the museum but was always hesitating to join,” said Stella Tarnag, an urban planner and environmental writer who moved to Washington four years ago. The festival was the excuse she needed—an all-events pass came with her membership.

Cinderela (Cindy) Bermudez of the D.C. suburb of Alexandria, Virginia, hadn’t visited the museum for many years. She is a film aficionado, however, and the chance to see creative independent films propelled her downtown. Besides, she said, “I believe in supporting small business,” as the owner of her own residential cleaning company.

The filmmakers varied widely in experience as well as native land. Silvia Ponzoda, for example, from Alacante in Spain, has awards and 10 years of experience under her belt. By contrast, Zulma Aguiar, who grew up in San Diego and now lives in Arlington, Virginia, is a go-get-‘em newcomer who just finished an engineering degree and master’s of fine arts from Renesslauer Polytechnic in New York.

Aguiar’s work is represented in the festival by two short videos, “Juarez Mothers Fight Femicide” and “Humanitarian Water,” also about the U.S.-Mexico border. In addition, she has a gallery installation at the museum called “Turnstyle!” which uses videos of the two countries’ border officials to stream over gallery visitors, dramatizing conflicting homeland security and immigration issues.

“It’s amazing that they’re supporting emerging artists,” said Aguiar of the festival organizers. She said people often get confused when she explains she is integrating electronic art and engineering. “They’re not sure if you’re a street hustler or you make beads,” she said. “Now, this show helps get us into museums.”

Silvia Ponzoda has shown her films in festivals in Florence, Zurich, Taipei, Istanbul, Turin, Barcelona and in Cuba; she won an award last year at San Diego’s Women in Film Festival. At the Women’s Museum, she is showing “Palabra de mujer: A Woman’s Word,” a 2004 video of three contemporary Arab women writers who are voices for social justice: Nawal Al Saadawi of Egypt, Hanan Al Shaykh of Lebanon and Janata Bennuna of Morocco.

“I wanted people to know these three writers . . . to show that in the Arab world these kinds of women exist,” she said. “Sometimes we have this very simplistic idea about the Arab world.”

More than 800 people from 70 countries competed to get into the festival. The work of Aguiar and Ponzoda represent common themes that emerged from the films and media work chosen, including crossing borders, self-determination and breaking out of traditional roles. Today, only 5% of top grossing films are directed by women. The museum is planning on more festivals in the future to help narrow that gender gap.

Some in the audience see film and the arts in their own professional futures. Network graphic artist Janice Jones and Martha Barnes, secretary at an elementary school, frequently talked when Jones would come to fetch her 11-year-old daughter Tatianna at the Annandale, Virginia, school where Barnes works. Discovering a shared passion for films, they decided to explore the Women’s Museum offerings together. Jones is taking arts-management courses. Barnes, who belongs to Women in Film and Video, is writing a screenplay. She is thrilled that the museum “is helping break down the barriers for everyone to get in.”