A Closer Look: Flying - Confessions of a Free Woman
Remember when you were a little kid and someone would ask you what you wanted to be when you grew up? No matter what your answer was–and if you were like me, you had a different answer just about every time you were asked–you probably didn’t stop to consider all the potential complications of what it really would be like to be a grown up. Even if you did grow up to be a cowboy or movie star or Secretary of State, unless you had a tough childhood, you probably didn’t spend much time as a kid thinking about things like paying rent or finding the money for to pay for health care. All those responsibilities and obligations of adulthood were so alien to you that they never really registered in your brain.
Once you actually did become an adult you had a fuller comprehension of the way the world works but even then did you really understand what it means to be a grown up? Flying - Confessions of a Free Woman, opening at SIFF this Friday, is an intriguing exploration of that very idea. In six hour-long segments (shown in three hour blocks), New York filmmaker Jennifer Fox opens up on camera in the company of an international cast of characters–friends she’s met around the world–about what it means to her to be a woman today. Rejecting the use of a crew to preserve the intimacy of the conversations recorded on film, Fox and over a dozen women (and a couple men) from the US, South Africa, Asia and Europe take turns passing around a movie camera to record the conversations they’re having. The stories they share are their own and include such topics as love, sex, family, career, dealing with cancer, suriving personal trauma, fighting corrupt institutions, creating life and seeing it come to an end. In short, life as it really is.
Despite the differences in their cultures, personal histories and current living circumstances, all these women share a common language and experience, something that was the inspiration for Fox’s project. In her thirties, Fox began to realize that all the conversations she was having with her friends were so important to her. She’d been raised to believe her life would be very male-centered–indeed, at the very beginning of the film she confesses that as a little girl what she most wanted to be was a boy–but she realized that the key relationships in her life were those with her female friends. Being a filmmaker, she naturally thought the best way to document these relationships was on film.
“I would make a film about the way women speak,” Fox says. Asked if she thinks that women do speak a common language, she replies, “Oh, yes, absolutely.” By showing the stories of women around the globe, she hopes to show that no matter where they’re living, women share a similar existence. “Especially in America, we tend to think we’re better off than ‘those poor women’ elsewhere. We have more freedoms, but women share struggles all over. There is a universal female life. We all have to work for gender equality.”
Fox illustrates this shared life by sharing her life–in various episodes we see her struggle with a “commitment phobia” complicated by her relationships with a secret married lover in South Africa and a new boyfriend in Switzerland, her pregnancy and miscarriage, her plans for IVF, and the hospitalization of her dying grandmother. Other women we meet include L’Dawn, going through a seven-year divorce; Pat, a blues singer with a brain tumor; Amina, a Somali woman living in England fighting against female genital mutiliation; and Chanthol, who runs a Cambodian shelter for women caught in the sex trafficking trade. All of the women who appear on screen share their stories in an open, honest, accessible way.
Fox says, “The beauty of stories is that you can relate to, find power in seeing those representations [that] help women to find power in their own lives.” She hopes that women viewing Flying will feel “I have nothing to be ashamed of” and that it “engenders self-acceptance, that it’s okay to be an average woman.” At screenings of the documentary, audiences want to talk about the film and are inspired by how open the women are: “Wow, that’s the first time I’ve seen a real life on film” is a common response to seeing it.
The female focus makes watching Flying a special experience for women, but men don’t have to feel excluded from the film: “Men just enjoy the drama of it” and “get into the soap opera” experience of watching the stories unfold. Men tell Fox that they are curious about what women do in their lives and appreciate getting a chance to see the reality. Younger men also say “this is our life, too. A lot of men are struggling with the idea of what it means to be a man. It’s like you’re supposed to be all thing. Men relate to the film.”
SIFF is screening the six-hour miniseries in two three-hour segments. Part 1 debuts on Friday, April 4, at 7:3o pm; you can catch both parts on Saturday and Sunday and then parts 1 and 2 alternate Monday through Thursday. Fox will be on hand to speak at screenings on Saturday night and Sunday.
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Zee Grega, that was beautifully written. It sorta makes me want to see it (after 5-6 years of having given up on the "cinema"). Too bad that there isn’t an 8 hour showing of #s 123.
[…] people, SIFF is screening Flying - Confessions of a Free Woman (see ”A Closer Look” here), the excellent documentary by New York filmmaker Jennifer Fox in which she and her friends from […]