Ladies’ Nights

[May 14th, 2008]

Allison Anders isn’t the only highlight of the Portland Women’s Film Festival. There’s plenty more ladylike filmmaking distributed among POW Fest’s four nights—and much of it is local. Here’s a closer look:

Person, Place or Thing

Under Elle Martini’s direction, Person, Place or Thing, a lackluster film just shy of 17 minutes long, managed one thing: to remain utterly confused about just which one of the three title nouns it wanted to be. I’m partial to Portland portrayals, but while gray skies, the convention center and a Smart Park garage all enjoy cameos in Martini’s work, it’s difficult to get a grip on exactly what the director hopes we’ll take away from the unfocused film, unless it’s to bolster our town’s unfortunate glam-homeless stereotype. Good-looking lead Zoe McLellan’s makeup remains immaculately intact as she clicks her heels through an evening of public bathrooms, her gig at a dive bar, poetry recitation to strangers in the aisles of Powell's Books, and the unemotional 30-second finale of selling her snatch to some dude in his car. I’ll take a vowel for $200, Vanna. SARA MOSKOWITZ. 7 pm Thursday, May 15. Included in the Local Shorts Showcase.

A Sentence for Two

“I don’t like to talk about it,” says Trisha, one of the three pregnant inmates of the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in local director Randi Jacobs’s documentary A Sentence for Two. The line captures the pain expressed throughout the film as incarcerated women talk about the fears and apprehensions they feel, knowing they will give birth to their children in prison. The strength of Jacobs’ documentary is in these powerfully evocative testimonies. They grip the viewer by displaying the basest of maternal compulsions, giving the film a lasting effect. Perhaps more poignant than the story of their pregnancies is the emotion felt as each woman describes how they must give up their baby to serve the remainder of their sentence. This supports Jacobs’ basic question: Is motherhood a privilege surrendered by convicts, or is there a way that Oregon and the Department of Health Services can allow a mother to bond with her child behind bars? JOE WATTS. 9 pm Thursday, May 15.

Zoologic

Dewy splashes of pastel color and squeaky sound effects accompany the unbridled cuteness of Nicole Mitchell’s hand-drawn animation short about an ornery, frumpy zookeeper who tussles with the animals inside their cages before the crowds arrive. (The flock of flamingos are just trying to enjoy their morning.) In the end, though, the menagerie has the last laugh. SARA MOSKOWITZ. 3:15 pm Saturday, May 17. Included in the “Laika Presents Animation Shorts” program.

Like a Ship in the Night

The current sentence in Ireland for undergoing an abortion or helping a woman procure an abortion can be life in prison. (Man, Catholics are harsh). That’s why every single week around 200 Irish women hightail it to England to get abortions. And nobody back home says a damn thing about it. Melissa Thompson’s 30-minute film is not so much a documentary—it lack a single voice from the pro-life front—as a somber piece of video art that plucks a trio of stories from a nation of women whose bodies are bound as much by tradition and faith as by law. Living in a country where abortion is illegal and access to sexual health information scant, the stories are suitably frustrating and grim: a country girl too embarrassed to tell her lover she didn’t know what birth control was; a college girl who choose a future painting over having a child on her own; and, most affecting, a married, “good Catholic” mother of five, who, after 18 years of raising her kids, simply refused to “do it again.” Each of these “filthy criminals” stole across the Irish Sea to visit English doctors (as the title infers); pain, depression and anger toward their homeland stowed away with each on the return trip. With frank talk from English clinic volunteers and small legal advances (Irish women have had the right to travel and to obtain information on procedures available in other countries since 1993), Ships contends that Ireland is taking tentative steps forward. But the government has never considered making abortion legal. “They just don’t talk about it,” shrugs one Irish woman. The numbers speak for themselves. KELLY CLARKE. 5:15 pm Saturday, May 17. Included in the “Many Faces of Womanhood” Program.

Why We Wax

When women get together to drink a couple bottles of wine and “just talk,” terrifying things can come to light. Case in point: this sassy doc with a tight focus on removing “the hair down there” from New York-based film makers Kimberly Wetherell and Amy Axelson. In the short span of 19 minutes, the pair careens from defining terms like “merkin” and “Jabba the Hut pussy” to divulging centuries-old depilatory practices involving quick lime, bat’s blood and cat shit. A series of short, foul-mouthed interviews provides both crotch-waxing insight and feminist theory from practitioners and pained subjects, while quick cutaways of elaborately sculpted bush and hair removal gone wrong elicit shrieks of giddy horror. Why we wax? “It’s a weapon of mass distraction,” muses one woman. The same could be said for this pert documentary. KELLY CLARKE. 9:15 pm Saturday, May 17. Included in the “Don’t Bring the Kids” program.

The Shadow Within

Something of a mash-up between The Ring and The Sixth Sense, The Shadow Within features plenty of creepy visuals (blacked-out eyes, shadowy ghouls like the bad spirits in Ghost) and a child who communes with the dead—in this case, Maurice Dumont is talking with his dead brother Jacques. It gets even creepier when a slew of forlorn ladies (whose husbands are away at war) solicit home-schooled Maurice and his stoic mother for what basically amount to séances with their own dead children. The story’s interesting enough—the estro-conflict comes courtesy of a woman doctor (played by Kate Winslet’s sister Beth) whom the mothers disdain for acting as if she “knows better”—and the desolation takes all forms: sonic, chromatic, atmospheric. The novel-based script is a bit too deliberate (a woman even remarks of Maurice, “That boy is special,” after it’s been aptly shown), but the actors, particularly Hayley J. Williams as Mama Dumont, do a winningly job at selling the grim terrain. AMY MCCULLOUGH. 11:30 pm Saturday, May 17.