Kim Longinotto

By Jerry White

Speaking to a group of high school students at the 2005 Telluride Film Festival, where her new film Sisters In Law had its North American premiere, Kim Longinotto thought it pertinent to remind her audience that she uses “a big camera.” It was her way of gently contesting the idealism about tiny digital cameras as a means of achieving greater intimacy with your subjects. What matters is how you deal with people, how you work with them to build mutual trust, Longinotto insisted. If people are suspicious of your motives, it won’t matter how small your camera is.

Longinotto’s work encapsulates, then, the debates that emerged during the last technological revolution in documentary, the emergence of cinéma vérité in the ‘60s. Her films are, broadly speaking, part of this lineage: she more or less eschews voice-over and favours wandering long takes that appear to encapsulate complex, unpredictable situations. But she has also moved well beyond these sorts of debates, bringing the vérité documentary well and truly into the late-20th and early-21st century. Even though Longinotto, like D.A. Pennebaker, deals with both pop and politics, she has none of the fascination with power that characterizes so much of his work. Yet she’s also quite free of the piety which marks too much political cinema of the vérité variety, past and present: she’s a hard-headed progressive, but well aware of the contradictions that characterize every aspect of contemporary life.

Longinotto is a restless spirit, although far from flighty. She has made clusters of films in Japan (five films), Iran (two) and Africa (three), spending her career hopping back and forth among these places, never leaving any of them entirely behind (the African films, for instance, date from 1990, 2002 and 2005). While her work is clearly indebted to feminist documentary, there’s something slightly anarchic, slightly nutty about a lot of what fascinates Longinotto, an off-kilter quality which sets her apart from an earlier generation of feminist filmmakers.

This is especially true of the Japanese films, which began in a familiar vein with 1989’s hour-long Eat the Kimono (co-directed with Clare Hunt), a straightforward portrait of the Japanese performance artist Hanayagi Geshu. We are treated to some of Geshu’s performances and hear her thoughts on Japanese politics, culture and history: women are held back by much of Japanese culture, Hirohito was a war criminal who killed more people than Hitler and it’s shameful that his death is still mourned. So far, nothing too strange. Longinotto and Hunt followed with TheGood Wife of Tokyo (1992), which is similarly engaged with young, eccentric female performers, this time Kazuko Hohki’s “band” The Frank Chickens, who dress up in wacky costumes and perform ridiculous, parodic pop music. But the film soon settles on Hohki’s mother, who leads a quiet life comprised mostly of avoiding her husband (a retired engineer who just wants to be left alone to do his calligraphy) and leading a devotional group that, while greatly resembling a religious cult, is probably too goofy to deserve that label: at one point, Hohki’s mother sings the strangely catchy ditty “Spring is the time when cherry blossoms are in bloom / Let’s hand out the leaflets!”

At this point the eccentricity quotient starts to rise. Dream Girls (1993) is about the Takarazuka Revue, a “Pop Opera” company composed entirely of young women (who all leave by the age of 25) trained by their elderly male instructors with militaristic precision (literally: at one point the Japanese military comes in to teach the performers how to bow) and a manic-compulsive imperative for order and cleanliness: new recruits clean their live-in training facilities on all fours with tape on their fingertips. Yet despite the recruits’ suffering, and the blatantly patriarchal structure under which they live, Longinotto and collaborator Jano Williams (who would co-direct Longinotto’s next two Japanese films) nevertheless show the Revue to be a place where young women are given a very real sense of possibility, where they can rise to a kind of centrality in Japanese public life that would otherwise be out of their grasp.

A similar ambiguity lies at the core of Shinjuku Boys (1995), a portrait of female escorts who live as men. They do not consider themselves lesbians, nor do their girlfriends: they are, instead, the “ideal men” that young Japanese women are thought to crave, sensitive souls who can still express masculinity. On the surface, this might point up some rather unhappy societal truths about the degree to which gender norms are hard-wired in Japan , and how the very idea of homosexuality is off the table. And yet, there are some truly astonishing moments of tenderness: one sequence, where two young women discuss whether they should stay partially dressed to maintain the illusion of heterosexual bliss, or undress and so achieve some real intimacy, recalls the uncontrollable, slightly naïve passion of the first lesbian sex scene in Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle (1974).

Gaea Girls (2000) brings us back to Dream Girls territory, taking us inside the training facilities of an all-female pro wrestling team. Apart from the physical toll of body slams, Longinotto and Williams also show the emotional anguish of the trainees: a young woman is verbally abused for fighting in an unprofessional way, even though her face and mouth are filled with blood (an amazing shot: while the trainee’s injury is apparent from her place at the edge of the frame, the camera’s slight move to capture a full view of her face is quite startling), while others are constantly slapped around by their young, bombastic, sadistic and blonde-dyed coach, herself a graduate of the programme. As with the Takarazuku Revue, the Gaea facility is far from being a utopic feminine escape from Japan ’s oppressive patriarchy, but again, Longinotto and Williams show us that these athletes view pro wrestling as their one chance to have an impact before settling into a life of marriage and family.

Longinotto’s Japanese films are bracketed by her two about Iran, made in collaboration with Ziba Mir-Hosseini: Runaway (2001), which deals with a group of runaway girls who wind up in a women’s shelter in Tehran, and the celebrated Divorce, Iranian Style (1999). The latter is rightly the more famous of the two, as it deals with what seems to be a counter-intuitively progressive aspect of Iranian life: the Imam-run divorce tribunals, which, while certainly governed by a difficult-to-navigate bureaucracy, also seem to offer a chance for genuine negotiation and the possibility of an equitable outcome for their female appellants. “I’d wanted to make a film in Iran for quite a long time,” said Longinotto in an interview with Sara Teasley for the Japanese magazine Documentary Box in 2000, “mainly because there was such a demonized view of Iranian people in England after the Salman Rushdie affair, everyone thinking it was a nation of fanatics.” Divorce, Iranian Style is far from an apologia for the Islamic Republic: gender-equity problems and the spectre of domestic violence remain very much in view. And yet Longinotto and Mir-Hosseini lucidly demonstrate how something very complex about the way women interact with the state is taking form here, how desiccated judicial protocol is increasingly bent to societal demands—and not only in Iran.

“The film is about how a society is struggling to impose an old system on a new developing society where women are changing,” continued Longinotto in the Teasley interview, though she might just as well be talking about her newest film Sisters in Law (2005), co-directed with Florence Ayisi. The film centres on the state prosecutor and judge in a small Cameroonian village, female officers who wear full British-style legal garb, are observant Moslems, and emerge as true feminist icons. Most of the cases which come before the court involve child abuse, wife beating, or both, and judge Beatrice Ntuba and state prosecutor Vera Ngassa are, to say the least, tough as nails with these violent offenders: at one point, Ntuba snaps at a woman who has beaten her niece that she’s not to call her “sister” but by her judicial title. This insistence on protocol and the maintenance of distance between court officers and the accused is perfectly consistent with Ntuba and Ngassa’s attempt to build a neutral state apparatus that knows neither prejudice nor favouritism. But as always, Longinotto shows more: at the end of the film, Ntuba visits the woman in her dormitory-style prison, is warm towards her, asks her how her time there has been, and tells her that everyone wants her to do better. It is a strikingly familial moment, a reminder that a democratic state is not meant to be cold, that it is bound to be advocate in some way for all of its citizens, even its worst offenders. The fact that the film shows women who are acting as judges and prosecutors and aggressively pursuing cases against abusive men has rightly been at the centre of discussion, but just as important is the way in which Longinotto and Ayisi present, as in Divorce, Iranian Style, a compelling view of the ways in which strong-willed individuals can contribute to the renewal of democracy in post-revolutionary or post-colonial societies, despite the formidable forces pushing towards autocratic rule by the powerful—and guess which gender they tend to be.

Even as Longinotto’s films become more explicitly political, they are not thematically inconsistent with her films about female pro-wrestlers, or, for that matter, with one of her earliest films with Clare Hunt, Hidden Faces (1990). Ostensibly a portrait of the renowned feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi, as seen through the eyes of Safaa Faye, a young Egyptian feminist now resident in Paris , Hidden Faces weaves the idiosyncratically personal together with the broadly political. Even while showing El Saadawi in a less than flattering light—she treats one woman very roughly at the beginning of the film and displays an arrogant indifference to the experiences of Faye’s relatives throughout—Longinotto and Hunt utilize her finer aspects to craft a vivid and complex portrait of women’s lives in 1990s Egypt . A scene where El Saadawi and Faye argue gently about female genital mutilation is a precursor of Longinotto’s later concerns, both political and geographical—it is only a short leap from Hidden Faces to 2002’s The Day I Will Never Forget, which deals with the grassroots response to female genital mutilation in Africa . The most important aspect here is Longinotto’s complete lack of romanticism in her search for the ways in which women make their way through the world, and her fearlessness when confronted with contradiction. She needs that big camera; this is big stuff she’s dealing with.

Kim Longinotto’s films are distributed in North America by Women Make Movies (wmm.com)

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