The Reel Women festival is a three-day event showcasing rarely seen work by female filmmakers. In its second year, the fest has added one Saturday afternoon panel — “Discovering Identity Through Film” — and selected all documentaries, different in tone and subject matter. The festival ends Sunday with Katya Bankowsky’s Shadow Boxers, and the award-winning documentary about acclaimed Dutch boxer Lucia Rijker provides the festival just the kind of knockout note on which to end. Rijker is a woman making her mark in the predominantly male-dominated world of boxing — without apology and without excuses. “This girl will impress you,” explains Rijker’s trainer Freddie Roach. “She impressed me. People told me, ‘This girl can fight.'” I thought, ‘Sure, she can fight for a girl.’ No, she can fight for anybody.” The festival movies are profiled below.
¡AMERICANOS!: LATINO LIFE IN THE UNITED STATES: Last year, the most popular name in Los Angeles for newborns was Jose. Susan Todd and Andrew Young’s documentary focuses on the undeniable Latino presence in modern America as well as the continuing struggle for Latinos to find their identity (one humorous sequence finds subjects arguing about the Chicano/Latino/Hispanic moniker). Interview subjects include El Vez, the flamboyant “Chicano Elvis” whose repertoire includes a song called “I’m Not Hispanic”; Aida Alvarez, the first Hispanic woman to become a member of any president’s Cabinet, criticized for not looking Hispanic enough; and Mariposa, a Puerto Rican spoken-word poet, fighting prejudice from her family for being “American.”
FIRST PERSON PLURAL: In the 1960s, the South Korean government was so overwhelmed with orphaned children that they expedited their little ones to families abroad at an unprecendented rate. One of those children was Cha Jung Hee, a little girl adopted by a loving San Francisco family, renamed Deann Borshay, and soon settled into cozy, suburban life. Eventually, however, Borshay (now Borshay Liem) discovered that in their haste to ship a child to her American family, the government sent the wrong child. In this deeply introspective documentary, Borshay interviews family members and even puts herself in front of the camera as she tries to sort out what it means to be a daughter in two different worlds. (Deann Borshay Liem will be in attendance for a Q&A following the screening.)
INDUSTRIAL BODIES: This 15-minute experimental documentary by Khmasea Hoa Bristol examines the death of her Vietnamese grandfather. (Director Bristol will be in attendance for a Q&A following the screening.)
NAKED STATES: Over five months, New York photographer Spencer Tunick toured America, asking people to take off their clothes. Amazingly, it worked, and in this “full frontal feature-length documentary” director-producer Arlene Donnelly interviews the people who dared to bare and the stranger who got them to do it. (Donnelly will be in attendance for a Q&A following the screening.)
SHADOW BOXERS: This documentary by Katya Bankwosky follows Dutch-born boxer Lucia Rijker’s rise from the 1995 Golden Gloves to her pro bout at the Women’s International Boxing Federation World Title in 1997. Bankowsky enlists plenty of experts, from promoter Bob Arum to Oscar de la Hoya, to explain why she is considered the best female boxer in the world. And as we enter her world, she lends some insight into why the best female boxer in the world might still sleep with a stuffed animal (a black sheep, no less). The film begins with a string of snapshots of other female boxers — and points out how female boxing, like the movies about it, has ballooned since the 1995 decision to let women fight in the Golden Gloves. But Rijker is the film’s magnetic center, a remarkable athlete and woman.
This article appears in August 11 • 2000.