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The Preferred Sex...
The Desired Number
( English, Spanish / 54
min. )
Country : UK
Producer : Daniel Riesenfeld
Director : Ngozi Onwurah and Manjjira Datta
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Nigeria is
the most populous country in Africa - yet it has
one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in
the world. In Iboland, Eastern Nigeria - the setting for
the first section of this moving two-part documentary -
director Ngozi Onwurah films the special ‘Ibu Eze’
ceremony held to honour women who have borne
more than nine children. But there are dissenting voices
too, which question whether it is really a blessing for
women to bear large families without any consideration
for their quality of life. The second section, set in New
Delhi, tells the heart-breaking story of Lali Devi, the
mother of five children who poisoned herself and two of
her daughters with rat poison, because she had not
managed to bear a son.
Ventre Libre (Liberation)
( English,
Portuguese / 52 min. )
Country : Brazil
Production Co. : Casa de Cinema
Producer/Director : Ana Luiza Azevedo |
"Nowhere else are the
rich so different from poor, the
whites from the blacks, the educated from the ignorant.
So what about men and women?" asks film-maker Ana
Luiza Azevedo. Intercutting interviews with women
describing their own experiences with statistics on
Brazilian health-care - or the lack of it - she paints a grim
picture of the stark choices that face millions
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 of women in Brazil today.
Women recount how,
desperate to avoid
pregnancy, they were
persuaded to agree to
sterilization in their
teens - at the age of
15, 18 or 19. But if
sterilization perpetuates the inequality between men and
women, abortion turns them into criminals, Azevedo
argues. And with two million abortions in Brazil every
year, it’s a crime "the state, the church and the courts
pretend not to see."
The 5-Minute Project
( English / 10 x 5 min.
)
Country : USA
Production Co. : The 5-Minute Project
Producer : Leslie Adams
Director : Munira Sen, Shona Geary, Hui-Jung
Chi, Daphane D. Jaferis, Rosemary
Kisakye, Lisa-Leilani Williams, Wim
Chandavy, Miiko Kodama, Ellen Sumter
and Lisa Hovinheimo |
THE 5-MINUTE PROJECT was born from the
conference Women Empowering Communication in
Bangkok last year where participants signed up to make
five-minute video on a subject of their own choosing.
Women from over 10 countries took part - the end result
is a video anthology of ten five-minute pieces from the
Cook Islands to Greece, India, to New Zealand, each
highlighting one of the sub-themes of the Beijing
conference, in both documentary and drama formats.
Films include a moving dramatisation of an Indian girl
raised as a boy, and a interview with a Polynesian
woman, who undertook a voyage in one of their
traditional boats, and refused to take on the role of the
cook.
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