The Riverwest neighborhood’s annual fundraiser collects material from Ashley Altadonna, Grace Mitchell, and more
With the Trump Administration ready to unleash its clammy tentacles on half the country, FemFest‘s celebration of women in the arts feels essential right now. The annual festival held in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood features a gallery event, nearly a dozen workshops, and loads of live music, and all to celebrate “talented and strong women, femmes, and feminine identifying groups though music, visual and performance art and poetry.”
Nestled at the tail end of the five-day event are two short film programs at Company Brewing on Sat, Jan 21. Familiar names like Carol Brandt (Fox in the Fan) and Kristin Peterson (@Me) will bring their confident fiction stylings to the showcases, but a number of entries that hew closer to reality are also worth checking out:
Avi, La Petite Ballerina (dir. Susan Kerns)
Kerns tracks a young ballerina’s progress in “Tour De Force,” Milwaukee’s ballet program for physically impaired young women. Avi’s affinity for ballet is a surprise the docushort is only too delighted to indulge in, showing her flit from video games to dance lessons to an evening where Tour De Force students take in a live production of the Nutcracker. Kerns, a co-founder of Gal Friday Films with Kara Mulrooney, discovered Avi’s story during a stint on the Milwaukee Ballet’s education outreach committee. A cute title sequence introduces her subjects (or “players” as she calls them), only to re-emphasize its main “player’s” unfettered enthusiasm.
Top Thrill + Another’s Window (dir. Grace Mitchell)
For her refreshingly frank triptych, Mitchell digs into the uncomfortable parts of her past, revisiting the experience of her first period while riding Cedar Point’s Top Thrill Dragster roller coaster before re-enacting a phone call she made as a teenager to confront the man having an affair with her mother. It’s a lot to take in, and Mitchell lessens the anxiety-laden material with old photographs, altered coloring book pages and a light animation style. Not one to keep things too predictable, Mitchell offsets a garish delivery system with Top Thrill‘s third chapter: resurfaced Hi8 footage of her mother setting mouse traps
Another’s Window is the more philosophical of the two, ruminating on the limits of space via its characters’ running conversation. Sliding from artwork to a mirror’s reflection to shifting frames of a neighborhood block’s houses, the digressions on finitude are fittingly tidy, perhaps out of necessity. To borrow from one of Mitchell’s conversationalists, “Forever is too long.”
Whatever Suits You + Playing With Gender (dir. Ashley Altadonna)
Both selections from the Frameline Voices multimedia initiative, Altadonna’s films tackle gender identity head on. In Whatever Suits You, Altadonna recounts her experiences as a transwoman. While she alters clothing and sews in front of the camera, her narration is interspersed with old photographs for a kind of transition visual journal about honesty and perspective.
Playing With Gender brilliantly reinterprets an Eisenhower-era instructional video on gender identity. Approximated right down to celluloid scratches from an invisible projector, Altadonna’s faux how-to actually strikes an exquisite balance between comedy and sincerity, eliciting laughs while never diminishing the complexity of experiences gender brings.
Pvssy Project (Nellie Vance, Brittany Nordstrum, Kate Parisi, Andrew Nordstrum)
The most outwardly collaborative of the showcase, this joint effort on sexual assaults is devastating throughout its running time but only needs one quote to haunt its audience: “There are people who have it way worse than I have.” Its unsettling notion is only compounded by the fact that it’s assault survivors expressing it. Pvssy Project is a devastating piece of filmmaking. And it’s a vital one. Its creators do little to truss up the spartan surroundings for the women they speak with, cross-cutting between recollections to quilt together a single monologue on pain, awareness and hopefully, something better and brighter.
- Both programs precede two full lineups of music on Sat, Jan 21 at 12:00p and 2:00p at Company Brewing (735 E. Center St., Milwaukee). Admission is FREE. Complete ticket information for FemFest can be found at rwfemfest.com.