Flying:confessions of a free woman

On the occasion of “Nu Yishu – Series IV: Nu Red” Group Exhibition at Imagine Gallery from March 8th to May 12th, 2009 and in continuation of International Women Day (March 8th, 2009) celebration the six part film 'Flying:confessions of a free woman will be screened at venues in Beijing from March 12th - April 16th.

Proposed in Beijing by Ellen Pearlman, Denise Keele-bedford and Imagine Gallery, in collaboration with all the different screening venues. For information on dates and venues go to: http://flyingconfessionsofafreewoman.blogspot.com/

本片在北京的放映由艾伦 皮尔曼，德妮丝和想象画廊企划，并与共同合作的放映地点及www.flyingconfessions.com and http://www.zohefilms.com 协作而成。
这次活动在2009年3月8日至5月12日想象画廊举办的“女艺术 系列展览之四：女红”群展期间，也适逢3月8日国际妇女节的庆典之时。

http://flyingconfessionsofafreewoman.blogspot.com/
www.flyingconfessions.com
http://www.zohefilms.com



Jennifer Fox is Flying
by Ellen Pearlman
Pakistani women cover Jen properly with a scarf while they walk in public down a small street on their way to a grassroots meeting of rural Pakistani women. Photo provided by Zohe Films.
“I had to keep filming to figure out this modern crazy life,” Jennifer Fox says at the beginning of Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman. In 2002, she was at a crossroads and needed to make a different life for herself. The result is this eerily convoluted but totally engrossing six-hour epic. It starts with grainy childhood clips of Fox as a little girl in a two-seater airplane with her father. As she states in her adult voice, “I wanted to be like my father, I wanted to be free,” because that was where all the power lay. Power certainly did not reside with her mother, who may have ruled the roost along with the director’s maiden aunt and grandmother, but underneath she frothily seethed. Born into the first generation of women who could make not just money but also the rules, Fox explores over a period of almost four years and 1,600 hours of film her own relationship woes: exotic married lover vs. dependable boyfriend, motherhood vs. childlessness, and what it means to be a privileged white, middle-class, first-world female filmmaker who goes jetting off to 17 countries. She contrasts her position with the larger woes of the world, including cancer, female genital mutilation (FGM), male dominance through purdah and the big one, death.
Fox walks with us and her camera into the drugstore, buys a home pregnancy test, shows the instructions, reveals the results (pregnant!) and breaks down weeping. She is scared and elated and doesn’t know what to do. If you use a camera for four years to figure out your own and your girlfriends’ lives you must either touch something new and unique, or give in to platitudes. The true relevance of this film is that it shows there are no longer any real platitudes. What is true and unique is that Fox has to go it alone and learn what any real explorer knows: the way is deeply uncharted.
Fox takes us into areas I personally have never seen a filmmaker go, such as her own ob/gyn exam, where she films her doctor pointing to the sonogram of her non-viable, weakened fetus, soon to be D&C’ed and ripped from her body. Fox is so gutsy with her camera that if she hadn’t been anesthetized she probably would have filmed her doctor performing the ghastly procedure.
In Flying, Fox traverses through a large cast of characters, a veritable “we are the world” of women, while she figures out her own life. She speaks to and with the women by passing the camera back and forth. A Shoshone Indian endures a horrific custody battle, and a South African sexually abused divorcée wonders if she can ever manage a relationship again. There is a Soweto single mother who survives economically only by living inside a village matriarchy, an Egyptian journalist co-parenting within a happy marriage and a German cancer patient whose doctor unexpectedly falls deeply in love with her. We meet an East Indian grassroots organizer, a Russian adulteress, a Cambodian survivor of Pol Pot running a shelter for kidnapped sex workers, a Pakistani woman who refuses to marry and must face the consequences, a Somali exile who lives in London and fights the practice of female genital mutilation; and a Bosnian war refugee. Sound dizzying? It is, and all these confessions and revelations are as cloying as a lavender sachet, or as riveting as an unexpected secret eavesdropped conversation.
“Someday I will meet the one and get married and then my life will begin,” one of the women muses. This is the subtext of Fox’s film as it explores the sad truth that women muddle though life defining themselves by their relationships. The question raised again and again but not answered is: why don’t men feel this way? Never before have women had so many options, or been so free, but as one woman puts it, “The older we get, the more confusing it gets.”
CPU Meeting: Sichan, left, an advocate at the Cambodian Prostitutes Union meets with a prostitute who is trying to get advice and protection from a violent gang of men who target her at the brothel where she works. The police think she is crazy. Sichan warns her about going to the police because they are swayed by bribery. Photo provided by Zohe Films.
Having previously been warned by one of her friends, “Do you think no one would get hurt?” Fox breaks up with her married lover when his wife finds out about their affair and immediately turns the camera on herself miserably wallowing in a steaming bubble bath, weeping. When her grandmother is dying, her every breath a death rattle, Fox films it. When she tries to get pregnant using fertility treatments, she films the injections going right through the center of her belly. She films her lovers in bed; she films them as they wake up and get dressed. She films herself while she inevitably boards yet another airplane to fly halfway around the world to ask Indian women if they know how to masturbate. Giggling hysterically, they ask if she knows how it’s really done.
What saves this work from becoming a mere reality TV show is the powerful humanity behind each woman’s (and by inference, each man’s) plight, and the skillful editorial decisions of how to present that plight. No one emerges unscathed from the battle of the sexes. Fox also turns the camera on her own family, backing down at each critical impasse until her mother reveals something Jennifer never knew: the woman is deaf in one ear. How could Fox know so much about women globally, and so little about what went on in her own backyard?
Flying is post feminist, in that the freedom that women fought so valiantly to achieve was granted, and then, like a Pandora’s Box, whipped up a whole new set of woes. Now that at least some Western women can choose how to live their lives, where does this put them in relation to women who are not so uniquely blessed? Or in relation to their own aging and mortality? This is where the film moves from indulgence to profundity. Most of the world’s women can’t even imagine the choices Jennifer has, and they go out of the way to let her know it, providing a sobering and convincing reality check. The film delves into those 17 lives by examining abuse, abortion, activism, adoption, AIDS, aging, career, creativity, death, divorce, disabilities, family, feminism, freedom, FGM, homosexuality, illness, identity, love, marriage, motherhood, pregnancy, sexuality, spirituality and war. That’s a huge undertaking for anyone, much less one lone woman with a hand-held camera.


介绍：
珍尼佛 福克斯是一个享誉国际的获奖导演、制作人、女摄像师、教育家。在过去的25年中她参与了不计其数的纪录片的拍摄。她的第一部影片《贝鲁特 — 最后的家庭电影》曾在9个城市的影院上映，在20个国家的荧幕上播放。并拿到了7项国际奖，包括1988年Cinema Du Reel电影节的最佳纪录片及最佳电影摄像奖。由她导演的十小时电视系列片《一个美国人的爱情故事》在PBS/BBC/ARTE频道的播出，开拓了电视产业的新视点，在当年风度入席由纽约时报及另五家美国主流报纸提名的“1999年十大电视系列片之一”，被评为当年最好的电视系列片。她近期的作品，受好评的，尖锐的，6部分影片《飞行 — 一个自由女人的自白》由丹麦电影学院发起，与一个独立的“丹麦、美国”影业制作公司合作完成。在丹麦TV2、美国公共广播公司、艺术频道、ARTE, YLE-1, SBS, SVT, ICON和荷兰人文频道的播出，并获得了威望创新资本基金会的金费资助。“飞行”的首映是在2006年阿姆斯特丹的国际纪录片节和圣丹斯电影节2007年的特别活动及其它的活动，并于最近完成了北美20个城市的影院巡回播放，之后美国的公共频道、TV-2、SVT、YLE在2008的夏天相继播出了本片。Fox目前正准备剪辑一部新的专题纪录片，拍摄20多年，名为《学习游泳》，与荷兰佛教徒电视网络共同制作并获得了哈特利电影基金会赠款，Fox制作的多部影片都曾获奖，《爱情与黛安娜》，《如履薄冰》，《双重曝光》，《项目十》，《一个自由的南非的真实故事》、《牧童》，《印第安人》，和《律师们》，及最近发布的《绝对安全》，她曾是多部纪录片的顾问，包括《南方的抚慰》和《石材读者》。Fox也曾作为参照人参与过主题纪录片《挫折感与好莱坞》和电影《真实瞬间的定义》。制作之余，她是世界各地的大学、电视台、政府文化部门电影专业讲师。


飞行：电影“一个自由女人的自白”介绍

“现代女性想要的是什么？当今世界哪里适合她？”
以前在我们人类集体里从未有这么多妇女有这样的自主权，建立与创造一个自己的生活。然而，艰难的“抉择”独立和允许自由后，依然不一定带来幸福。而且，守旧的女性特征，仍然困扰着世界各地的妇女。
“飞行：一个自由女人的自白”是一个由6部分组成的电影，一个根据实际考察、贴近21世界女性生活的电影。这部系列故事和视觉的混合，记录了制片人Jennifer Fox’s从42岁至45岁自己三年的生活与来自全球各地，不同生活的勇敢妇女。以既幽默又深刻的方式，通过电影搜索新模式中的女性，审查两性的角色变化，努力理解各地妇女的角色，从而确定她们自己在那个时期是怎样一个定义。在这个两性和经济自由的新时代，奋斗中的女人是怎样？性别关系是怎样？一个正统派的基督教徒、还是艾滋病者？哪些行程可以自我定义和自我表达吗？她们在自己的眼前是得或失？男人和女人之间的事情真的可以改变吗？我们现在可以开始确定一个新时代的女性吗？
“飞行”采用真实的叙事方式，创新的拍摄技术，表现了一个独特、互动的妇女。探索了一种新的表达方式，是在“通过摄像头”之间，与所谓导演和所谓拍摄主题之间的交谈。这种处理的方法使很多纪录片竞争力出现不平衡，著名的Susan Sontag对摄像的定义：“摄影就是为事宜的物体的照片拍照，它意味着，让自己与世界发生关系，感觉这些知识——因此，这就是力量。”通过摄像机，传统的采访形式已被抛弃。作为角色，在任何时候都有轮流镜像的关系，通过妇女彼此之间，她们独特的，循环的方式，可以分析出她们在生活中怎样共享和对话。
这部摄像机深入地促进了导演和主题的密切联系与交谈。而不是一个客观的、权力的工具，使纽带断裂。它让参与者成为主题的创造者。