Within the Whirlwind

The International Women’s Film Festival, sponsored by UB’s Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender, returns for its 16th series with six weeks of Thursday night screenings.

Opening the festival on February 16 is Within the Whirlwind, directed by Academy Award winner Marlene Gorris (Antonia’s Line, Mrs. Dalloway). The film is based on the memoirs of Evgenia Ginzburg, a Russian academic whose comfortable life as the wife of a minor party official in the 1930s comes to an end when she is denounced under Stalin’s infamous purges and she is sentenced to ten years hard labor at a Siberian prison camp. Filmed in Poland and Germany with a primarily British cast, the film stars Emily Watson, Ian Hart and the German star Ulrich Tukur (The Lives of Others, The White Ribbon). Accompanying the feature will be the animated short film “I Was the Child of Holocaust Survivors.”

Recent events with the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation should ensure plenty of interest for the festival’s second film, Pink Ribbons, Inc., a documentary that asks whether all those pink-themed charity events do more harm than good by obscuring the real issues in breast cancer, specifically why incidence of the disease have increased geometrically in recent decades. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with breast cancer researchers, survivors, patient advocates and public health professionals.

Other films in the series include Apache 8, about women from the White Mountain Apache Tribe who spent 30 years fighting fires in southwestern states; from South Korea, Treeless Mountain, about two young girls left to fend for themselves when they are abandoned by their other; from France, Tomboy, the story of a 10-year-old girl who moves to a new neighborhood and is mistaken for a boy; and the documentary Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, directed by Pamela Yates, who will also give a master class on March 30.

All films will be screened on Thursday evenings at 7pm at the Market Arcade Film and Arts Center. All tickets are $5. For more information visit genderin.buffalo.edu.