JINHA

ISTANBUL – At the ongoing 13^th International Women's Film Festival on Wheels, Filmmor, German director Margarethe von Trotta told of her struggle with the masculinizing field of film.

The festival this year will feature 61 films, shown in six different cities across Turkey. The year's theme is "Women's Cinema, Women's Resistance, Cinema of Resistance." The festival kicked off on March 13 in Istanbul with a march.

Margarethevon Trotta, known as a leading force in the New German Cinema movement and a notable feminist filmmaker for films like Hannah Arendt and Rosenstrasse, spoke about her experiences as a filmmaker since the early 1960s. She said women were not even able to be thought of as directors. Today, there are many more women directors in Germany, but inequality continues, she said.

Even as struggling for a field of women's cinema was important, said Margarethe, it was also important for women not to be imprisoned in a secondary status. She said the slogan of "women's cinema" under which she and other German women directors had struggled had now created a kind of ghetto for directors.

"At the same time, leaving behind the concept of 'women's cinema' has not meant leaving behind the struggle for women in cinema," she explained. She mentioned the importance of women's film festivals, such as Creteil in France. Even at major festivals, she said, it was common not to see any women in the main competition—as happened recently in Berlin.

She discussed her film Hannah Arendt, which follows the philosopher's thinking about the "dark times" she finds herself in as she follows the Eichmann case. The films of Margarethe, as well as Iranian director NahidPerssonSarvestani, are being particularly featured in the festival.

As has been done for the last six years, the festival will distribute Golden Okra awards to the worst depictions of women in film at its closing on April 27. 

(zd/fk/mg/cm)