On this year’s International Women’s Day, Ultra Dogme presents four short portraits that open up a vast field of artistic and political possibilities.
Elspeth Vischer writes about Helke Misselwitz’s expansive yet intimate documentary Sperrmüll (1991) which follows an East Berlin woman and her punk musician son on the cusp of German reunification, where the hope of a better life is caught between two political systems, one collapsing and the other illusory. Liam Kenny portrays Gina Telaroli as not only a key filmmaker and bastion of cinema culture but also an intrepid forayer into new forms of spectatorship and of using and reusing the film-turned-digital image. Dana Reinoos charts the path that led to the musician Angel Olsen’s latest album Big Time (2022), from a “Mona Lisa smile” to an outburst of queer love and new possibilities. Within Fox Maxy’s kaleidoscopic cinema of protest, Laia Nadal finds a rich combination of furious commentary, on centuries of ongoing, brutal colonialism and hegemony, as well as statements of radical gender autonomy and the still-burning potential for a communal sense of belonging.
All of these pieces offer up potent political questions, about the bleak expectations and cages which women are still forced to endure, and of new ways of being that could be found, by looking within and binding together.
International Women’s Day 2023
Moving East to West Amidst the Sperrmüll
by Elspeth Vischer
Gina Telaroli: Reimaging
by Liam Kenny
Angel Olsen: Traveling Towards the Tiniest Light
by Dana Reinoos
Fox Maxy: Framing the Land
by Laia Nadal
GOOD WORK!