Krista Schreiber
The ultimate D.I.Y. gal
Niku Arbabi has D.I.Y. covered--now she's moved on to running her own film festival
By Anna Breshears
Published: February 14th, 2006 | 1:30pm
She sews. She creates and distributes zines. She organizes all-ages shows. If she sends you a gift, you can be certain she’s designed the card and the label herself. And she just happens to put together a women’s film festival each year and tour it around the country.
“I always loved movies. I suppose it was a needed escape from small town life. I had fun making videos with friends for school projects, played with animation, and loved watching movies,” Arbabi explains. “Being so different in a small town, I was used to not seeing anything like me represented anywhere, so it seemed normal in a way that it would be missing from media, too. But it also made me driven to find things and people I could relate to and get out in the world, and finally to create the images, the sense of community that I found missing.”
Arbabi arrived in North Carolina in 2001 and discovered that women were not represented in the genre she so loved. Rather than sit back and complain about the “boy’s club”, she took matters into her own hands. “I knew there was a lot more great media out there by women than most of us would ever get the chance to see,” she explains. After participating in a local film and arts event called Ms. Films, Arbabi turned it into a non-profit organization and full-time festival with a new mission.
The purpose of Ms. Films, according to Arbabi, is twofold: to create a showcase for films by women and to address a more complex issue--why there are fewer films made by women. “From the discouragement that girls experience from a young age to learn or participate in anything of a technical nature, combined with being told they just aren’t good at those kinds of things, to pressure to be in front of the camera, women trying to enter this male-dominated field face challenges at every step they take towards becoming a filmmaker. I wanted to figure out a way to offer those tools to girls, to give women who may never have had the chance before to see a camera, shoot film, learn lighting techniques,” she explains. “Film can be intimidating to anyone. Most of us assume we couldn’t just make a movie--we have to take classes and learn to use complicated and expensive equipment. I wanted to make film more accessible, to give women the chance to have a hands-on experience with film.” To that end, Arbabi’s film workshops do not create hierarchies; she doesn’t distinguish between participant, filmmaker, and instructor nor are the classes labeled “beginner”, “intermediate” and “advanced”. She prefers everyone to think of the experience as “a group of people coming together to share film, a variety of experience and skill.”
This year’s Ms. Films festival, held in Arbabi’s current hometown of Durham, North Carolina, takes place February 23-26 and will focus on “Activism Through Media”. For Arbabi, this theme is “a way for us to further address our mission of empowering women to find a voice and make change using media, and allows us to widen our scope to include other forms of media to this end.” Highlights include Ladyfesto, a film chronicling the organization of Ladyfest Philadelphia presented by Parisian director Anne Cremieux, and Living Room: Space and Place in Infoshop Culture, a screening and panel discussion about the documentary, infoshops, and underground publishing. “Both pieces give us the chance to address a feminist approach to media from a few angles--documentary, organizing events that feature art and film by women and empower them,” says Arbabi. She also notes that this year, they received a number of strong submissions by Indian women filmmakers and will highlight their work. They will also include a program of films made by teenage girls involved in Seattle, Washington’s Reel Grrls project.
To find out more about Ms. Films and the upcoming festival, or to make a donation, please visit their Web site at msfilms.org
Issue #44
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