The Projector | China’s female film directors still struggling to break into the boys’ club
- Veteran European women filmmakers, such as Agnès Varda, honoured at the Berlin International Film Festival
- However, their contemporaries in China are still awaiting their moment in the sun
Never mind the young guns competing for the Golden Bear: at the latest Berlin International Film Festival, which concluded its 10-day run on February 17, it was veteran women filmmakers who received the biggest cheers and emerged as the leading voices of their profession.
Belgian-born French auteur Agnès Varda led the charge, receiving the Berlinale Camera, the latest lifetime achievement award to be bestowed on her by festivals – Locarno in 2014, San Sebastian in 2015 and Cannes in 2017 – not to mention the Oscars in 2017.
The 90-year-old filmmaker brought Varda by Agnès (2019) to Berlin, a funny, insightful documentary in which she probes the many aspects of her six-decade career, among them the feminist politics shaping her work and world view.
Hungarian filmmaker Márta Mészáros, 87, enjoyed a high-profile return to the festival that propelled her to international prominence. Appearing before a sold-out screening of Adoption, her 1975 film about a widowed furniture-factory worker’s struggles to become a mother, Mészáros regaled the audience with a hilarious account of her trip to Berlin nearly 45 years ago, when the movie won the Golden Bear, the festival’s top prize.
The director recalled lugging her own suitcases across a Berlin Wall checkpoint, meeting people who had no idea who she was (she had already made several films) and a bizarre exchange with a festival organiser who rang her in her hotel room with news that she had won the Golden Bear (she told him it didn’t matter, as she had already received six other prizes from other independent juries at the festival).