Davis Feminist Film Festival interns and director share their process in coordinating the festival event
By EVELYN SANCHEZ — features@theaggie.org
Hosted by the Women’s Resources and Research Center and sponsored by the Manetti Shrem Museum, the Davis Feminist Film Festival (DFFF) celebrated its 20th anniversary on the weekend of Friday, May 9 and Saturday, May 10.
With a team of eight interns led by a graduate director, the festival’s theme, “Unkempt,” showcased feminist films from around the world. This year’s grassroots event featured projects that represented the messiness of gender, bodies and nature.
Beginning as a fundraiser for the Gender and Global Issues program in 2005, the DFFF amplifies personal, intimate and political projects, seeing 1,182 submissions from 88 countries.
Outreach and Marketing Coordinator Sonny Baker, a second-year English and cinema and digital media double major, offered their sentiments on the outcome of the event.
“I’m really, super happy with how everything turned out and how much energy people put into stuff this year, especially with how [large] the turnout was,” Baker said. “This is our biggest festival yet.”
With an estimated 130 attendees on Friday night alone and film selections from countries from Canada to Iran, success for the festival represented something more for the team. With DFFS occurring during a troubling political climate for women and queer people, Baker finds it more important than ever to celebrate marginalized voices and their work.
“There are stories that are not going to get told through the general media that need to be told,” Baker said.
Having the final say on the selections, Co-Curator Ngoc Tran, a third-year Asian American studies and psychology double major, elaborated on the process of the film selection.
“We work to screen most of the films so that we can decide which ones we want to put in the lineup,” Tran said. “We also develop the theme surrounding the festival. We don’t necessarily pick films that are supposed to be exactly aligned with the theme, but we use it to frame our thinking and curation process.”
The approach to film curation also resonated with Aaron Benedetti, the director of DFFS for the past three years, who is a UC Davis Ph.D. candidate in cultural studies and feminist theory.
“Directing the festival has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my time as a graduate student here at UC Davis,” Benedetti said. “On the one hand, I am able to experience and curate a huge variety of really fantastic independent feminist films.”
Similarly to Baker and other interns, the messages that are conveyed through works made for and by marginalized voices resound with Benedetti, encouraging him to work diligently to promote the messages.
“Queer [and] feminist stories, onscreen and off, have always really interested me and affirmed me at different points in my life,” Benedetti said. “To help plan and execute an event that uplifts this kind of art is extremely rewarding and politically meaningful.”
A personal connection underscores the team’s relationship with the film. With “Unkempt” focusing on reimagining, redefining and reclaiming established systems, DFFF allows for the dominant perspective to be challenged.
“The theme is collectively agreed upon,” Baker said. “The way we choose our films is between a thousand submissions that get pre-screened to fit our criteria, which has to be about women or a minority group of [people of color], queer or transgender peoples. We had about 100 films get through that prescreening.”
Baker continued to outline the selection process, highlighting a personal favorite film.
“Then, the interns take teams of two and go down the list and watch them, rating them one through five,” Baker said. “My [ranked] five pick is actually going to be filmed at the end of the day, which is ‘Mpamosavy.’ It’s my favorite, and it is phenomenal.”
“Mpamosavy,” directed by Arielle Lone, follows the events of the French occupation’s massacre of Malagasy rebels in 1947. The film contrasts the past experiences with present-day descendants, following the Mpamosavy’s revenge as history repeats itself.
“Unspoken injustices inspire me to create,” Lone said in the festival’s written program. “My goal is not to victimize Madagascar to glorify the violence, but to denounce it. To confront the audience with reality, I must show the horrors of history.”
Benedetti also shared one of his standout selections screened during the festival.
“One film that especially stuck with me this year was ‘Desync,’ directed by Minerva Marie Navasca,” Benedetti said. “She and her co-writer, Chen Sing Yap, created a film about how something as personal as your relationship with your mother can be tightly coiled up with historical forces that appear very impersonal or distant from us — like colonialism, capitalism, eugenics [and] histories of exploited labor. It’s important to recognize that the specifics of those experiences are particular to the Filipina and Filipina Canadian women in this film.”
With such careful effort being placed on curation and design, Nico Singh, a first-year biomedical engineering major and a general graphic designer for the festival, shared their experience with designing the messiness of the theme.
“We picked ‘Unkempt,’ because we’re really trying to focus on intersectionality and this inherent messiness [and] taking pride in that,” Singh said. “A lot of that came down to reclaiming our roots and embracing the natural world. So, when I was doing a lot of the design work, I interpreted that as plant life and growth, and we knew that eco-feminism was also something that we really wanted to highlight for the festival. Keeping that in mind, I knew that we wanted a lot of those line-heavy images.”
The year’s program was also a highlight of the event. The booklet, containing all of the screenings and directorial biographies being featured in the festival, interwove the Unkempt theme within its pages.
“One of the definitions of Unkempt that really stood out to me was the hair,” Cassie Ngo, a third-year design major and the festival’s program designer, said. “Because of a lot of colonial views of hair, when women of color are in their natural state, their hair is curly, frizzy and unkempt, but with a negative connotation. We wanted to reclaim that.”
The program is designed elegantly with many forms of lines running through all pages, where Tran deliberately drew splintered cracks on the page of films that all dealt with breaking — whether from the cracking of a pot or a shattered mirror, there was much deliberation in the design of the festival.
“This inherent messiness is boiled down right into our core,” Singh said. “It’s written into our DNA. Unkempt is a fundamental part of every living thing, so I wanted the graphics to reflect that.”
The Davis Feminist Film Festival is an important platform on campus that continues helping to tell stories about people whose stories are not normally told, including communities outside of Davis. For those interested in interning for DFFF, visit the Women’s Resources and Research Center’s website or visit their Instagram at @femfilmfest.
Written by: Evelyn Sanchez — features@theaggie.org
