The Chicago Feminist Film Festival began with an enthusiastic Yes!-the exclamation Susan Kerns gave Michelle Yates, her fellow assistant professor at Columbia College, when the latter reached out with her idea.
Now in its fourth year, the fest, which is free and open to the public, aims to expand and explore gender equity in filmmaking, pulling from a variety of styles and narratives to forge connections between underrepresented artists and audiences. Comprised mostly of shorts, its programming comes from all over the world and operates with the concept that anybody can be a feminist.
“Storytelling has always been a way to create commonalities among people and to create shared experiences,” she says. “For us, it’s important to show audiences the different stories they can see in a theater. Maybe it’s a story they haven’t thought about before, or maybe it’s something that they’ve even experienced but have never seen on screen.”
“Feminism is about gender equity. It’s about resisting the patriarchy and misogyny. I think there are these ways in which people reduce feminism down to capitalist notions of individualism,” Yates says. “But feminism is about resisting structures of oppression that promote certain ways of being at the expense of others.”
Wed 2/27-Fri 3/1. Film Row Cinema, eighth floor, 1104 S. Wabash. The Chicago Feminist Film Festival, free
