Filming Desire - A Journey Through Women's Film

A playful investigation into how female filmmakers deal with themes such as sex and desire in their work. What artistic and feminist considerations influence their vision of cinema? Is “doing the deed” on the big screen always politically charged? And how can one avoid the pitfalls of vulgar exploitation? Marie Mandy puts these issues to renowned filmmakers such as Agnès Varda, Jeanne Labrune, Jane Campion and Doris Dörrie. Using collage-style editing, Mandy intersperses excerpts from their interviews with scenes from their films. In Jeanne Labrune’s (1998), for example, a woman explicitly calls the shots during an affair. And in an entertaining sex scene from Doris Dörrie’s (1998), a woman almost completely ignores her partner during sex, obsessing instead about how hungry she is. “Sabotage” is how Dörrie refers to it. She actually believes it is impossible to film a sex scene. Sex is simply never as beautiful and sensual when seen from outside as when it’s experienced from within. This is one of the ways in which these women oppose male dominance in the film world, both in front of and behind the camera. Along the way, we get to see an extensive and varied “female oeuvre.”