After 17 years of running the Rocky Mountain Women's Film Festival, artistic director Linda Broker no longer worries about attracting controversy, or even attracting an audience. Both just show up every year.
Broker always has a sellout crowd at the two theaters she uses for screenings over the course of the two-day event, which took place this year from November 12 to 14. But featuring movies about women and the issues they care about is always something of a balancing act in the conservative community of Colorado Springs, CO, making the festival's success even more impressive. This year's lineup, which focused more on female power than on star power, unlike so many other film festivals, looked at tomboys, fairy tales, sex after 65 and the home funeral movement. No less than four films highlighted the societal toll of police brutality, war and poverty.
"There are probably quite a few people in Colorado Springs who wouldn't come near this festival," Broker sighs with a shrug. She assembles a roster of thought-provoking films on purpose, not to attract protest but to encourage lively discussion among a close-knit community of cinephiles and filmmakers. "There are also people who see this festival ‑- I don't want to overstate it ‑- as a real highlight."
That's what it was for director Tami Gold, who came to the festival to talk about her film Every Mother's Son, the heartbreaking story of three mothers dealing with the deaths of their sons, all killed by the New York Police Department. She relished the collegial atmosphere, where directors delight in each others' works. "We're about content, storytelling and building bridges," Gold says. "It's not glamorous. It's driving your own car, schlepping, carrying your own camera."
A weeper opened the festival. The Kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt follows a fresh-faced Colombian presidential candidate, a stunning mother of two, who criticizes the government for corruption. She hands out Viagra along with campaign literature ("a vote for me will be like Viagra for Colombia") and wears a dust mask to emphasize her call for a breath of fresh air.
Peasant revolutionaries kidnap Ingrid mid-campaign, and the filmmakers join her family, aiding their efforts to keep her campaign alive and their endeavors to free her. As the film ends, we see only a dated "proof of life" video released by the kidnappers last year. The struggle continues.
The theme of Tracy Droz Tragos's personal documentary Be Good, Smile Pretty sprang from an idle Google search the filmmaker did on her dead father's name. Up flashed a witnessed account of his death in Vietnam, when Tragos was four months old. At the time, soon after a telegram arrived bearing the awful news, Tracy's mother packed away her dead husband's photographs, medals and uniform, and remarried. Now, as an adult, Tragos pokes into battered suitcases and asks disquieting questions. Her search for her unknown father awakens buried grief in the entire family.
Eventually, she finds in her father a man of humor, intelligence and love. "The kind of man my father was is exactly the kind of father I crave," Tragos muses. "And that must be why I crave it. Because I was supposed to have it."
Back at the festival's screenings, joy at watching such interesting fare constantly overtook the difficult subject matter. "This is decadent," an audience member whispered to her friend. But given the emotional films, it's no surprise that by mid-Saturday the tissues the organizers had placed outside the theaters were gone.
