Women Make Waves International Film Festival

Program

The Scary Movie

Peggy Ahwesh 1993 USA b/w 8min DCP
AHWESH's two young actresses, Martina and Sonja, cross-dress in vampire capes and werewolf claws, re-enacting familiar horror tropes. A roughly corresponding soundtrack of stock screams and "scary" music suggests that the girls' toying with gender roles and power dynamics may have dire consequences.

Director

Peggy Ahwesh

Over the course of her career, Peggy AHWESH has produced one of the most heterogeneous bodies of work in the field of experimental film and video. A true bricoleur, her tools include narrative and documentary styles, improvised performance and scripted dialogue, synch-sound film, found footage, digital animation, and crude Pixelvision video. With playfulness and humor, she investigates cultural and gender identities, feminism, the role of the subject, language, and representation. Peggy AHWESH came of age in the 1970’s with feminist politics and the experimental film underground. Her formative years were spent in Pittsburgh where she worked for horror director George ROMERO and as a film programmer at the Pittsburgh Filmmakers, Inc. Originally she worked in the Super 8mm film format and now works in film, video, and digital media. AHWESH’s art practice insists on political and social topicality and theoretical rigor, while incorporating playfulness, humor and the absurd in an open embrace of the inexplicable. Retrospective exhibitions include: Girls Beware!, Whitney Museum of American Art; Filmmuseum, Brussels; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Peggy’s Playhouse, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, among others.

Peggy Ahwesh

1983 The Pittsburgh Trilogy
1985 From Romance to Ritual
1985-1995 The Fragments Project
1987 Doppelganger
1989 Martina's Playhouse
1989 The Deadman
1993 Strange Weather
1993 The Scary Movie
1994 The Color of Love
1997 The Vision Machine
1998 Nocturne
2001 She Puppet
2003 The Star Eaters
2004 Certain Women
2007 The Third Body
2007 Warm Objects
2016 The Blackest Sea
2017 The Falling Sky
2019 Kansas Atlas
2021 Curve the Night Sky
2023 OR119

Cinematographer: Peggy AHWESH  

Production Assistance:  Barbara BARG 

Audio: Bradley EROS

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)

jfbuchanan@eai.org