Créteil Dispatch.

There are only a few annual festivals out there featuring the work of women working behind the camera and one in particular is considered the best in the world: Créteil Films de Femmes (March 10 through 19). Jackie Buet, with the support of the Créteil municipal government and several cultural and media organizations, has directed this event since the 80s. It is a meeting ground for women working in international cinema with special retrospectives and sidebars. The festival also houses a unique archive of each year's films in cooperation with the filmmakers and distributors.

This year, the theme was "Utopias," and I Shot Andy Warhol by Mary Harron was one of many films screened, a film about the controversial visionary artist and poet Valerie Solanas.

Créteil features several competitions including a youth prize awarded by a student jury who selected Frauke Sandig and Erik Black's Frozen Angels (Germany 2005) as best feature - a future take on genetic engineering told from the perspective of donors and surrogates, set in Los Angeles.

The public's prize went to Both (USA/Peru 2005), a film about intersexuals made by the Peruvian San Francisco-based filmmaker Lisset Barcellos. According to the director, the medical establishment surgically establishes the gender of a child with the genitalia of both sexes at birth. The records are then sealed without any possibility to monitor how the "adjustment" affects the individual. Doctors explain that "it's easier to dig a hole than to build a pole," says Barcellos.

The jury prize went to Sévigné by Marta Balletbò-Coll (Spain, 2004), the story of a theater director who must choose between her husband and the woman who has written the material for her latest production. Jamie Babbit's The Quiet was another strong contender in the feature film competition, a film about father/daughter incest, starring the haunting Elisha Cuthbert (24) and HBO veteran Edie Falco (The Sopranos) as mother and daughter. There is a made-for-TV feel here, but with talented performances in a labyrinth of intrigues. Babbit's fascination for cheerleaders, closet cases and gender bending informs her latest feature.

Sidebars this year included the work of Austrian director Ruth Beckermann on Jewish identity in Europe; she was given a ceremony and a series of shorts on "Women and Humor" sponsored by the European Coordination of Film Festivals. Several films from Vietnam and Cambodia were also featured. One of the films was Bride of Silence, directed by a brother and sister whose paths parted after the Vietnam War. Thanh Nghia Doan, who went to the USA, and Minh Phuong Doan, who wound up in Germany, are reunited in a mythic film about a young man who tries to find out who his mother was after the death of his father.

Last year the Créteil festival spotlighted achievements in non-narrative cinema and this year once again acknowledged the work of media artists Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, both of Greek origin and based in Paris since 1975. Their work, which they call "corporeal cinema," explores sexuality and androgyny. The French Archives restored two of their Super 8 films from the 1980s - Selva. Un portrait de Parvaneh Navaï and Chutes. Désert. Syn, which have made their way to several art museums and film festivals, including MOMA, Créteil and the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

Créteil devoted a special retrospective this year to guest of honor and Francophile Jane Birkin. The acclaimed actress released a new solo CD on the first day of spring, Fictions, with selections by a host of songwriters: Neil Hannon, The Magic Numbers, Beth Gibbons and Rufus Wainwright. Birkin's film debut was in Antonioni's cult classic Blow Up (1966) as a teenage fan. She was married to the late Serge Gainsbourg, starred with him in Je t'aime moi non plus (1976) and has worked with several major French directors, including Jacques Rivette and Agnès Varda. Birkin selected La Pirate (1984) by Jacques Doillon to be screened for the gala event in her honor, a film she believes didn't aesthetize her physicality. A film that certainly shows the range of her acting abilities and her trademar rolled-up shirt sleeves was the three hour extravaganza, Rivette's L'Amour Par Terre (1984).

Posted by dwhudson at March 23, 2006 1:03 AM