Remembering as Women’s Resistance in Everyday Life
Written by Weiting WU
The five documentaries in the “Everyday Battlefield” program lead us to discover the cruelty and rupture resulting from national violence, but we also see the women’s resiliency and boldness. All of them, are victims of wars, family members, and advocates. The documentaries capture their grief and their struggles with pain. Because of the wars, some of them were forced to reshape their identities. Others shed their old identities, gained new strengths and formed new ones. These five titles are not only personal stories, yet also active involvement in politics and social history.
From individuals to collectives and from the environment to each family, we often witness women’s resilience. The scenes in Silence of Reason stunned me very much. Through forensic-style archive photos and victims’ testimonies, the director guides the audience in exploring the most inhumane system of national violence. During the Bosnian War, Serbian forces established a concentration camp in Foča and committed sexual violence crimes there. After these female victims bravely testified and left their nearly “silenced” testimonies, as shown in the films, the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia classified sexual violence as a war crime.
Through scenes of the scanned words and landscapes, many survivors’ testimonies make the singular violence and torture that the women in Foča’s concentration camp have undergone transcend time and space, becoming part of our collective memory. I must emphasize that it is possible for these survivors to be hurt again even when they testify about their experiences, considering the brutality and stigma of sexual violence. Thus, Silence of Reason uses anonymous numbers or letters to represent the women, allowing the unspeakable traumas to be witnessed. Though sometimes there is noise in the frame, and the aesthetics that refuse to be defined are hard to grasp, we repeatedly feel that these survivors who had testified have changed from victims, and that they become advocates in the negotiation and confrontation between the world, nations and societies.
Diaries from Lebanon documents the riots over four years in Lebanon. It includes an interrupted revolution, a pandemic, an unprecedented financial crisis, and a devastating explosion that destroyed half of Beirut. In this film, three people represent the past, present, and future of Lebanon. Georges, a veteran of the Lebanese Civil War, represents the past; Joumana, who won a parliament election and was ousted the next day and is also a feminist poet, represents the present; Perla Joe, a young woman who suddenly became the symbol of the 2019 revolution, represents the future. Through the stories of these individuals, the film explores how people can continue to dream in a nation where turmoil has never ceased, the government has been disappointing citizens, and the surroundings have collapsed.
In my opinion, this is also the question the director wants to ask herself. In an interview, she mentioned that Diaries from Lebanon is also her diary. While exploring the impact of the 2020 Beirut explosion on the three individuals, the director conveys her political views and personal emotions through the voice-over.
The three characters have been knocked down by national violence, but they stand up each time, as the title suggests and the director explains, “it’s like a love story, we have to believe if it doesn’t work out this time, it will work out the next time. We have to keep on believing that we have the instincts in us and we can make changes.” People stand up again and believe that they can fall in love again. This explains many people’s confusion about why there is always someone striving for political and social reform, even when the environment repeatedly frustrates everyone. After watching Diaries from Lebanon, I believe there is another possible answer: a new identity. For example, when the director asks one character if she will continue engaging in politics, she replies that before the explosion, she won’t. But after the explosion, she will. “I have a desire for vengeance. Not for me. But to avenge all the people who will be deceived again.”
If Diaries from Lebanon is the love letter of individuals and the nation, then the two documentaries on the Russia-Ukraine war, A Bit of a Stranger and Message from Sasha, represent the process of an individual, a family, and a nation drifting apart.
In A Bit of a Stranger, Svitlana LISHCHYNSKA explores how the national identity of four generations of Ukrainian women in her family has been eroded by Moscow’s long-standing imperial policies, making each newer generation of LISHCHYNSKA’s female relatives more “Russified” than the last. However, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine smashed their identity with Russia and forced them to find another one. This searching journey is more an emotional journey shaped by memories and family histories.
From a female perspective, A Bit of a Stranger examines the socio-political issues in Ukraine. LISHCHYNSKA explores how Soviet totalitarianism and Russification have influenced relationships within her family and how each generation has passed on their national identity to the next. LISHCHYNSKA asked her mother, “Who are you?” We could see that family and identity are not linear under a nation’s violent intervention.
Message from Sasha documents how a brave woman, her mate, her lawyer, and her friends confronted a nation that oppresses and silences its citizens through grand legal systems. On March 30, 2022, one month after Russian forces invaded Ukraine, the musician Sasha, with her guitar on her back, walked into a shop and affixed information about the war—information that had not been reported by official sources—to the price tags. One read: “Russian conscripts are sent to Ukraine. The price of this war is the lives of our children.” Another read: “The Russian army bombed an art school in Mariupol. About 400 people were hiding in it from the shelling.”
The system’s inaction towards individuals is also depicted in 1489. Shoghakat VARDANYAN filmed how her parents and she dealt with her brother’s disappearance using her phone. During the process of the nation shuffling the family members around, we see the system’s inaction, as the family must wait a year and a half for the results.
The “Everyday Battlefield” program challenges the single portrayal of women in most war-related films in the past. In these films, women are no longer merely supporting characters or victims. They document, remember, disseminate, shape new identities, seek solutions, and live. Amidst the collective violence of the nation, women redefine their relationships with their nations and developed their own power and identities that cannot be taken away by any nation.
(Translated by Eva WENG)
