Walking through the Mission Sunday afternoon, I saw signs everywhere announcing that Ladyfest Bay Area would be arriving this week. There were colorful posters and postscards, black and white flyers listing events on telephone poles, folded blue schedules for the film and video festival, and the POW! exhibit of comic art was already open at Pond Gallery.
The first Ladyfest was held nearly two years ago in
Olympia, Washington (Lynn Rapoport wrote about her experience there for the Bay Guardian). It has inspired Ladyfests in Indiana, New York City, Glasgow, Chicago (where I attended last year) and other cities. More than a dozen are planned in the next year; the Amsterdam Ladyfest, which is also this week, even has jingles. While Ladyfest Midwest took place in venues all over Chicago, all of Ladyfest Bay Area will be in the Mission.
Every Ladyfest has featured music, visual arts, spoken word, performing arts, workshops, and film and video. Ladyfest Bay Area, which kicks off Wednesday evening and runs through Sunday, July 28th, is no exception. There are more than 30 bands and writers, 45 workshops and panels, performing arts events, four art exhibitions and twelve film and video programs. A complete schedule is
online.
Passes can be purchased once Ladyfest begins. Individual tickets are also available; some events and all the art exhibits are free. All profits will go to several non-profit groups -- including Serpent Source, which has distributed more than $175,000 in grants to artists, writers, musician and filmmakers.
It is impossible to even begin to cover all the films, but we can certainly nail a few highlights. There will be three workshops and four free film panels (details here).
The first film program, Looking is better than feeling you, is curated by Astria Suparak who will introduce it at the Victoria Theater on Thursday at 8 p.m. Audio pieces by Miranda July will be heard between films (July edited a special section of the July/August Independent which includes an article by Suparak on film programs she's curated).
On Friday at 3 pm at the Victoria, there is a screening of You Don't Know What I Got which won the Audience Award at the Doubletake Documentary Film Festival and profiles five women including Ani Difranco. There will be a retrospective of the
MadCat Int. Women's Film Festival Friday evening at 7 pm at the Victoria. Greta Snyder and a number of the other filmmakers will attend. This year's MadCat fest will be September 6 through 26.
That'll be followed at 9 pm by Sisters are Doin' It for Themselves (The DIY Program). Kara Herold will present Grrly Show, a 20-minute documentary on zines. The 40-minute Don't Need You chronicles the early history of the Riot Grrrl movement. It features interviews with Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile (who are performing that evening at Mission High School) and Madigan Shive of Bonfire Madigan (who are performing earlier in the day at Brava Theater); Shive will be at the screening. She started playing in Tattle Tale when she was 17 (their song "Glass Vase Cello Case" is featured in But I'm a Cheerleader).
Machiko Saito, who is collaborating with Bonfire Madigan, will show the Ladyfest trailer (watch it in RealVideo) and the short Pink Eye.
Animator Nina Paley has shorts in three programs. Fertco (online in QuickTime) and The Wit and Wisdom of Cancer from her documentary, Thank You For Not Breeding, will be shown as part of The Flesh Connection on Saturday at 3 pm at ATA. Another segment from it, The Stork (online in QuickTime), will be shown as part of Development and Displacement on Sunday at ATA at 3 pm. Three of her shorts will be part of "What's So Funny?!" (The Good Times Program) at 11 pm Saturday at the Victoria. She painted all 2500 frames of Panorama (online in QuickTime) directly on 70mm film.
Re-Framing 9/11: Women's Art and Activism is at ATA on Saturday at 5 p.m. It includes two pieces from the D-Word community's War and Peace project, Pauline & Irja and Invisible Girl (both online). Valerie Soe's Carefully Taught was part of Underground Zero: Independent Filmmakers Respond To 9/11.
Roberta Gregory's animated Bitchy Bits shorts are showing through August 11th as part of POW! The Power of Women in Illustrative and Sequential Art. There are also plenty of comics in the gallery to read.
Jenny Toomey, who heads the Future of Music Coalition, founded Simple Machines records and co-wrote a guide to putting out records and CDs, will be co-facilitating a panel on starting a record label Thursday afternoon and performing that evening at Brava. She recently talked about her involvement with Ladyfest.
And it is involvement that makes Ladyfest a different kind of festival. The audience doesn't just watch, they can learn how to create art and even instigate change. So it is appropriate that the free closing ceremony on Sunday at Mission High School will feature an open mike, a slide show of photos taken during Ladyfest and the creation of a collaborative LFBA zine. Anyone and everyone who attends, then, has the last word on Ladyfest.
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