Story and Photos by Elise Elshire
“Films by women, for everyone”. That is the motto of the Portland Oregon Women’s Film Festival, better known as the POW Fest. This annual event features top female directors’ work as well as young, local talent. Last Friday, Eugene’s Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts (DIVA) hosted a screening of four shorts from the lastest POW Fest held every March to coincide with Women’s History Month. Ethos sat down with three directors present at the screening of their respective documentaries.
A French woman narrates Nous Deux Encore, directed by Heather Harlow, and shares the story of the passionate love she shared with her late husband. The film is almost entirely comprised of still photographs from their life together.
Elise Elshire: What inspired you to make the film?
Heather Harlow: The film was inspired by Maxie, who’s the subject of the film. She’s now an 81-year-old woman. I met her two years ago through a friend of mine. Not only is she an incredibly vivacious and charismatic woman, but she had a story to be told and a box of photographs and a series of memoirs. As we got to know each other, I knew that I could learn a lot from her, and had this gem of a story that just wanted to be told.
EE: How did you become involved with film in the first place?
HH: Oh god, that’s a really long story – how long do you have? [Laughs] My background is incredibly diverse. I have always been a documentarian of sorts, but I started in photography, moved into writing, then scientific research, and I realized what I was seeing needed to be documented visually. I bought a camera, turned it on, learned how to focus, learned how to use it. From there, it doesn’t have any logical progression. I like to say I entered the film world through the back door, because I didn’t wake up one day and go “I want to be a filmmaker”, nor did I go to film school or anything of that nature.
EE: What do you think about the state of women in the film industry?
HH: I work in the commercial advertising world, so I work in a very male-dominated world. What I’m seeing in my professional world is still the same mentality as [the AMC television show] Mad Men – well, not that bad. But it is male-dominated. It’s refreshing when I come across a female director doing commercials because that’s extremely rare. In the independent filmmaking world, I am super refreshed by what I am seeing. And that is a lot of festivals like POW Fest and a lot of female directors coming up and being completely accepted and embraced by the community.
Gabe Van Lelyveld and Kristina Whipple both directed Talking Heads. The film includes fifty-six interviews with individuals who answered two questions: “Who are you?” and “What do you want out of life?”.
Gabe Van Lelyveld: Kristina and I had seen the original that was made in Poland in 1980, a film called Talking Heads. We enjoyed it and were inspired by the variety of answers in the original. How it inspired us was to ask those same questions and want to remake the film in a different time and place.
Kristina Whipple: For me, I was curious if there would be cultural differences in the answers to the questions and if people would answer similarly to 1980 Poland, which was still communist then.
EE: How did you both become involved with film in the first place?
KW: I had always wanted to make a film, and then I met Gabe through theatre, and he had already made a film, so the opportunity just arose.
GVL: I sort of slipped into it accidentally through being inspired by an individual who was undertaking an action that I wanted to document. I ended up making a documentary about that. It was really not on my radar at all until I met that person.
EE: What do you think about the state of women in the film industry?
KW: I think there is definitely less representation of women across the board in film, as far as the technical side of it. I think it’s a real loss to all of us because there are a whole body of stories that don’t get told because of that.
GVL: I completely agree. I think that diversity in voices represented in our media only benefits us as a society. The more women filmmakers we can support the better.
