The 6th Annual San Diego Women’s Film Festival
October 2nd through 5th, 2008

by Alicia Glass

The 6th Annual San Diego Women’s Film Festival returns, bringing movies to entertain, enlighten and enliven you!

This is the 6th Annual Women’s Film Festival hosted in our wonderful city of San Diego. The Foundation to encourage and display films made exclusively by women was founded in 2003, with a mere 25 entries. Now five years later, the Festival receives more than 400 entries from all over the world! The Women’s Film Foundation is always trying to get more attention brought to this Festival, and welcome any suggestions on advertisement and entertainment, including the aspiring female filmmakers!

This year, the SDWFF moves to a new venue. At least, that was what I had read on the website. I wasn’t very amused to find myself at the Pacific Gaslamp Theater in Downtown SD on Thursday, only to find out that opening day Youth Outreach program was still being held at the same venue from last year, the Museum of Photographic Arts, and that I had shown up too late to catch either one. I decided I wasn’t keen on Youth Outreach Screenings anyway, even though I think it’s a fine service for the SDWFF to offer, and went on with higher hopes for the festival the following day.

Friday evening found us at the Pacific Gaslamp again, for the wonderful reception set up by The Tractor Room, and Stag’s Leap Vineyard!

Saturday offered a filmmaker brunch at the Star of India for the filmmakers (free to the filmmakers and $10 for guests) before the next round of movies and shorts!

Sunday I was so very very tired, even with the fine films and services the Women’s Film Festival folks offered, that I watched all the shorts available and skipped the closing night film to get some well deserved sleep. However, I did have a wonderful time with the Women’s Film Festival, and do hope to return as I did this year, to the Fest next year!

Lights! Camera! Oh just roll the darn film already!

Locally Made Short Films

Extended Stay Director: Pamela Littky A brief jaunt about what an ‘extra actor’s life is really like, how he moves from job to job in given cities and in general manages to keep upbeat about the whole experience. Review Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Coup D’Todd Director: Jessie Wilson Todd Summers is the ex-superhero Coup D’Todd, now attempting to live a semi-normal life while his efforts are continually thwarted by friends, family and rivals. Review Rating: 6 out of 10

Flamingo Tango
Director: Leasa Thernes
As far as I could tell, it’s about a dissatisfied waitress who decides to get rid of everything that annoys her (including the job) and go learn to tango. Must be nice.
Review Rating: 5 out of 10

Proud Iza Director: Anna Condo A contemporary retelling of Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace”, which I’ve never read. Basically an ironic story of a woman who wants more of everything and drives her husband and herself into bankruptcy and beyond to get it. Review Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Redivider
Director: Theresa Hoey
A mysterious diner that apparently houses ghosts that noone can leave from is the setting for…I’m not quite sure, a protagonist with a haunted past would be my guess.
Review Rating: 6 out of 10

Cargo
Director: Jennifer Harrington
Refugees from Colombia are hiding out in a shipping container trying to get transported to somewhere better, when people in the container begin dying, much to the fright of the young female main character. Unfortunately for me, this movie was shot so dark I could barely make out what was going on. Which was a shame, because even for a short it had a good premise and could have gone fairly far.
Review Rating: 4 out of 10

Lucky Charm
Director: Heather Ostrove
A cute little black and white romp involving a lucky coin and what you would do if you found it. Better do it fast though, because apparently as soon as the coin is passed on, you DIE. Talk about disappearing luck.
Review Rating: 7 out of 10

Super Shorts and Experimental Films

De la tete aux pieds
Director: Josie-Anne Lemieux
Experimental sound and music short involving….alot of nature images and some fairly pretty music with a lot of piano. That’s about all I remember.
Review Rating: 6 out of 10

Hard Lines
Director: Eliza Ivanova
This short is actually a cartoon, done in another style you won’t see very often. It seemed to me this was a foreign cartoon, so that made it more difficult to get as well. Still, a strange cartoon about a young boy on the city streets, down on his luck and finding his way through life to friends, is a story I think we can all get behind.
Review Rating: 7 out of 10

The Things She Would Tell Me
Director: Miryam Welbourne
An odd animated short about two office women talking during their lunch, wherein one woman tells the other about how she thought of killing her own son when he was addicted to heroin. I’m all for cartoons most of the time, but this seemed a strange plot to toss into a cartoon remake of the actual telling.
Review Rating: 6 out of 10

Mosfetas
Director: Inex Enciso
Somewhere at the Tangiers border, two boys are trying to stay hidden in a transport truck, to take them across the border into dubious freedom. While they wait, the younger of the two begins dreaming of his new life. The term Mosfetas actually means ‘skunk’, which is what the border patrol calls the boys attempting to illegally hop rides in this manner.
Review Rating: 6 out of 10

If No War?
Director: Tanya Sleiman
A brief history of Yoshi, a California resident born in pre-WWII Japan. She spoke of the sacrifice of her mother and siblings calmly, and seemed to share much love with her neighborhood cats and even the raccoons. I couldn’t understand why so many of the audience seemed offended by the subject matter, or the honesty with which is was presented. War brings atrocities.
Review Rating: 7 out of 10

Dear Fatty
Director: Hsin-I Teng
A small girl is writing a letter to her missing hamster, apparently named “Fatty” for some reason. It’s a very nice little piece, full of the innocent child in all of us.
Review Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Incongruent Body
Director: Jian Lee
Issues with women’s body images and their frustrations.
Review Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Video Diary
Director: Amber Smith
An experimental film that’s really hard to explain, but then, that’s why they’re called experimentals.
Review Rating: 5 out of 10

The Red Scare
Director: Jaden Maher
A film that’s supposed to explore the violence done to women in the horror genre, inspired by Hitchcock and the like. The main protagonist, as far as I could tell, was a man dressed up as a woman, and the movie itself was a tad hard to understand.
Review Rating: 5 out of 10

No Yetis Allowed
Director: Candace Moers
Terribly sorry, but the sound didn’t work for this movie, so I really couldn’t understand what was going on at all.
Review Rating: 5 out of 10

Intelligent Design
Director: Catherine Forster
The minutiae of differences between Neanderthals and Humans, as presented by a little girl pretending to be a newscaster.
Review Rating: 5 out of 10

Happily Ever After
Director: Lidia Sheinin
Did you ever wonder what happens when the last proverbial page is turned? Find out here.
Review Rating: 7 out of 10

Viola: The Traveling Rooms of a Little Giant Director: Shih-Ting Hung Having seen this one like 4-5 times now, it still seems to me to be a short about a girl with issues within herself through the ages. Review Rating: 6 out of 10

International Shorts

 El Patio de mi Casa
Director: Pilar Gutierrez Aguado
Four lonely people who live together in the same apartment building come together for a night of unexpected bonding.
Review Rating: 8 out of 10

Passage
Director: Angela How
A late chance encounter on a train between two former lovers force them to look back over the past and the choices they made. This one, while fairly well done, seemed to try very hard to bring across the message that the male protagonist in this story is complete scum.
Review Rating: 7.5 out of 10

My Talking Dic Director: Zoe Popham A mixed culture couple in modern-day Bangkok, attempting to weather their relationship troubles, discover a whole new way of communicating when they’re surprise gifted with a talking dictionary with some unexpected results. Review Rating: 7.5 out of 10

The Portrait
Director: Rouzie Hassanova
It was a bit dark and difficult to understand, but as I gathered it a young girl had had enough of her father’s inappropriate attentions and accusations concerning the death of her mother, and decides to let her father know precisely how she feels before leaving. A bit shocking, but bear in mind this one (apparently) comes from a different culture.
Review Rating: 7.5 out of 10

As De Corazones
(Ace of Hearts)
Director: Silvia Gonzalez
An old man who wants nothing more than to spend his day playing cards with a friend is suddenly thrust into the unwanted role of grandfather with a granddaughter he doesn’t know at all. Turns out, she’s more like her grandfather than he would have imagined.
Review Rating: 7 out of 10

Pusling
Director: Christina Rosendahl
Apparently Danish, or at least from Denmark, I couldn’t tell what language they were speaking, personally. A little ditty about Piv, who’s being bullied by a classmate, Mia. A clear demonstration that, even as children, girls can be just as mean as boys. And Pusling apparently means ‘sweetie’.
Review Rating: 7 out of 10

The Maid
Director: Heidi Saman
How often do we ignore the people right under our noses? And by that token, how much do they see of our true selves that we really don’t want them to?
Review Rating: 7 out of 10

Mothers, Daughters, Rivals and BFF’s Shorts

 Mother Mine
Director: Susan Everett
I really liked this one. Instead of the adopted girl tearfully proclaiming her real identity at the beginning of the movie and having a tearful reunion with her biological mother, this movie takes rejection to a serious extreme.
Review Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Donut Heaven
Director: Annetta Marion
A bet involving a chain-smoking foul mouthed daughter and a food-obsessed mother reveals that they have a lot more in common than either would care to admit.
Review Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Best Kept Secret
Director: Karinah Westbrook
A young black couple who appear to have everything going for them is suddenly shattered when the wife learns a devastating secret in the most irrefutable way possible: her husband not only has another lover, but this one’s a man.
Review Rating: 7 out of 10

Dating in L.A.
Director: Katherine Sweetman
A seriously disturbing look at the morning after a crazed date.
Review Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Wasp
Director: Andrea Arnold
A completely broke mother of four attempts to juggle her first date in four years along with feeding her brood and keeping them safe, all in the same night.
Review Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Sexy Thing
Director: Denie Pentecost
This one is not for the faint of heart. I don’t know why it was called Sexy Thing, unless it was ironically. At any rate, it’s mainly a young girl and her mother on a hot car ride, the girl imagining and remembering what led to the car ride, which is actually an escape from her molesting father and horrified burgeoning lesbian friend.
Review Rating: 7 out of 10

Olive Prepares
Director: Siloen Daley
It was difficult for me to understand this one, it seemed a romance between two new tenants in an apartment building, with Olive preparing and hoping for love, aided by cartoony-like imagery.
Review Rating: 6 out of 10

Leaving Gussie
Director: Wendy Bednarz
A strange cast of characters: Gussie the apparently semi-autistic teenager, her erstwhile captor turned savior of a boyfriend, a strange woman with post-partum depression and many secrets, and all those looking for these people, make for an interesting if not interpretive movie.
Review Rating: 6 out of 10

One Winter Story Director: A full length feature telling the story of Sarah Gerhardt, the first woman surfer to dare the big wave “Maverick’s” as they’re called. The movie itself is done in a relatively soft black and white motif with a lot of smeared water shots, but then, it IS a surfing movie. Plenty of interviews with Gerhardt herself, from her difficult childhood caring for her mother, to her current fame and status amongst the worldwide surfing community, and impending motherhood. Review Rating: 7 out of 10

And if you’re still here,
The awards!

Best Youth-Made Film
Bear Attack – Girl Scouts Destination

Most Entertaining Film Made for Youth
Mallow – Kara Ulseth

Locally Made Short Film
Flamingo Tango – Leasa Thernes

Super Shorts & Experimental Films
Dear Fatty – Hsin-I Tseng

International Shorts – A Tie
1.     As De Corzones – Silvia Gonzalez LLA (Spain)
2.     Pulsing – Christina Rosendahl (Denmark)

Pioneers & Trailblazers
American Outrage – Beth Gage

Mothers, Daughters, Rivals & BFF's – A Tie
1.    Wasp – Andrea Arnold
2.    Donut Heaven – Annetta Marion

Women & Their Health
Just One Year – Joy Clausen

Curator’s Choice Award
Olive Prepares – Siloen Daley