Pushing back at the patriarchy: Berlin Feminist Film Week

Berlin Feminist Film Week reclaims the big screen for the sisterhood this International Women’s Day.

With Frauentag a newly-declared public holiday, what better way to celebrate than by attending what promises to be the biggest, most diverse Berlin Feminist Film Week to date? This sixth edition kicks off on March 7 at Babylon in Mitte with a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, Desiree Akhavan’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winner The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Starring the prolific Chloë Grace Moretz, it’s a slick, cine-literate coming-of-age tale set in a gay conversion centre in 1990s Montana. Akhavan strikes a neat balance between hard-hitting drama and spiky comedy – it’s certainly a whole lot more fun than the recently-released, similarly themed Boy Erased. Other feature highlights this year include Singled (Out), an engrossing doc about the stigma faced all over the world by single women in their thirties; the intensely intimate A Better Man, in which filmmaker Attiya Khan confronts her abusive ex-boyfriend; and The Artist and the Pervert, which explores the innately fascinating BDSM relationship between Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas and African-American kink educator Mollena Williams-Haas. There’s also a host of enticing special events planned at the Berliner Union Film studios, a new venue for this year. Some of these are in German only, but English-language options include a tech video tutorial class (Mar 8), a discussion about feminist motherhood (Mar 8) and a documentary filmmaking workshop (Mar 12).