“I am woman, hear me roar!”

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Themed ‘Complicated Freedoms’, the festival features work from 14 countries. “The films all speak to the topic of freedom,” says the festival’s co-director Magdalene Reddy.  “Whether it is a developmental journey, a process of unfolding, an illumination, or a result of political changes in the world around us, freedom comes at times of its own choosing; one doesn't always know what it looks like until you get there.” 

And it is here, where you may encounter the work of Eka Chavleishvili for the first time. She’s a Georgian actress, in her mid-fifties with a number of nominations and wins under her belt. In Blackbird, Blackbird, Blackberry, the big winner at Switzerland’s 2024 Film Awards, she sizzles with fierce authenticity in the face of the “bitches” in the community and the expectations society has of her. It’s an unexpectedly sexual role: the rather stolid 48-year-old virgin named Etero runs a humble store that sells basic toiletries, and she gives energy to the earth mother stereotype that outreaches politeness by exhilarating leaps and bounds.

Women who get pricked, poked and bruised because they are different from the rest, are very present in this year’s festival. Cait, performed by newcomer Catherine Clinch in Colm Bairéad’s Oscar-nominated The Quiet Girl, an emotionally abandoned nine-year-old from an indigent Irish household, is one of them, as is Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska) in The Peasants, unique for how the acting scenes are embellished with oil painting overlays. This piece is about a girl being different and threatening to other women, because she is beautiful. 

And while many in this year’s festival’s selection of films look at a mob face-to-face with an outsider, it is perhaps Unruly, the based-on-fact work about the shameful decades of Danish psychiatric legislation and enforced sterilisation of those girls not deemed ‘enough’ by society – be they seen as too promiscuous or not intelligent enough – that is the most harrowing. It features Emilie Kroyer Koppel as Maren, who brings light to her asylum peers, but a tightening of an already tightened smile to the powers that be.

Always “bests” are difficult to pinpoint unequivocally, when you are spoilt for choice. Sweet Dreams is an astonishing film made by Ena Sendijarevic. A tale of colonialism and potency, set in the cleavage between Holland and Indonesia, it features Hayati Azis in the role of its central character, Siti. She’s a slave woman who has been subject to the wiles of the master, an old man, detested by all he commands, except for the love child he made with Siti. Money and an itchily pregnant daughter-in-law, compounded with a bitter widow complete the women-centric narrative in this work which has the timelessness of legend and the surreal sense of myth. 

Sweet Dreams offers an inkling of old men forcing their way into the lives and bodies of young women, a theme developed with a sense of exquisite horror in the Belgian gem Love According to Dalva. It takes grooming under the EUFF loupe and while it presents another beautifully cast newcomer, Zelda Samson, under the directorial hand of Emmanuelle Nicot, a superb debut in her own capacity, it is a devastating and highly topical work. 

While many of this year’s pickings are set as period pieces, commenting implicitly on the nature of pre-industrial societal structures where a pitchfork can be as potent as a crucifix, there are also modern women here, bolshy in their own sense of agency. Baan features Carolina Miragaia as ‘L’. She’s a dead-ringer for US singer LP, and while the film is more of a mood piece than a story, it is one that plays with sexual ambiguity.

Easily the lightest work here is The Other Way Around, an essay from Spain on the complexity of marriage and relationships, which is funny and wise and features Itsaso Arana at its helm in the role of Ale. She and her partner Alex have been together forever. They decide lovingly to cast aside the bonds of their relationship and plan a party to bid one another farewell. It’s a work woven with self-reflection and film-making, philosophy and the comfort inherent in repetition, and you warm to Ale for her candour. 

If it is films that present women with a sense agency you seek, you will be able to find lots of examples. Juliette Binoche is absolutely riveting in The Taste of Things (The Pot Au Feu), a film that evokes Gabriel Axel’s 1987 masterpiece Babette’s Feast with its tantalising array of food and wine, discipline and perfection spread like an ongoing banquet of social intimacies across a table. 

Happiness is continuing to have what we already have, says one film; love is in the safety of repetition, argues another. But not all the women represented here are victorious or loved. Women like the wife, played by Lia Abuladze in Citizen Saint carry the weight of loss heavily, in the same way that ill parents are carried clumsily by their adult children in Dying, a German film, which should be mandatory for all film lovers.

There’s material here to astonish, to placate and fulfil in this year’s festival. Either way, you can look forward to being stimulated and provoked to rage or victory, a numbing sense of futility or one of total liberation!

Author: Robyn Sassen

For film synopsis, film trailers and booking information visit www.eurofilmfest.co.za

The European Film Festival 2024 is a partnership project of the Delegation of the European Union to South Africa and 14 European embassies and cultural agencies in South Africa:  the Embassies of Belgium, Denmark, Georgia, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine, and the British Council, Camoes Institute of Portugal, French Institute in South Africa, Goethe-Institut, Italian Cultural Institut, and Wallonie-Bruxelles International.  

The festival is organised in cooperation with Cineuropa, Ster Kinekor and The Labia and is coordinated by Creative WorkZone.