by BARBARA CASTRO
I am attending the 14th annual Tribeca Film Festival with Kate Daniels Kurz and we are trying to watch as many women directed films as we can.
Women are well represented at this festival with almost a third of the films directed by women. Bravo to Tribeca for their selections. Kate and I both saw and loved Laura Bispuri’s debut feature Sworn Virgin which has already been picked up for international distribution.
In northern Albania there is a five hundred year old tradition that permits a woman to assume a male role within her community. These women (“burrnesh”), also known as sworn virgins (“virgjinat e bitumen”), give families without male offspring or who had lost their men to war the opportunity to still have a male to head the household. The woman cuts off her hair, puts on a man’s wardrobe, and binds her breasts. To seal the deal she is required to take an oath of celibacy. Dressed as a man, she can carry a gun, drink in public, and has the right of primogeniture having more freedoms in her village than she would have had if she had stayed in her skirts. She is now addressed as he. In her film Sworn Virgin, Laura Bispuri uses this practice of gender transformation to explore the relationship between gender identity and freedom. It is an engrossing gender bender of a film.
Women’s International Perspective for more