Swedish director Tora Mkandawire Martens interacts with the audience after a screening at the Nordic Film Festival in the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing on March 3. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Nordic film festival in Beijing highlights women's right to equality in society, employment and more.
When Martha and Niki participated in Juste Debout, an international annual street dance contest, in 2010, the duo didn't expect to make history as the competition's first female champions in hip-hop dancing, traditionally a male-dominated area. While the two women enjoyed success in Stockholm, Paris and New York, their relationship faced problems.
A 90-minute documentary titled Martha and Niki, which won the Guldbagge Award for best documentary and best editing in Sweden in 2017, and has been shown in 36 countries in Africa, with more than 1 million views online, is now being screened in Beijing at an ongoing festival of Nordic films.
The documentary tells the story of how, even in the face of prejudice, the two dancers realize their dreams and also establish a strong self-identity in their field of work.
Xu Jia, 27, a Chinese visitor to the festival who lived in Sweden for three years before returning to China to start her own business, says "respect" is what came to her mind after watching it.
In Sweden, Xu adds, many girls learn how to ride horses at a young age and boys can learn knitting as a hobby or for a living.
"Maybe we are more traditional, but things have changed a lot," Xu says referring to Chinese society. "For example, though there are still more boys in hip-hop, and more girls in Latin and ballet classes, we see cool girls on television shows such as Street Dance of China."
Twenty films from the Nordic countries on women are being shown at the 3rd Nordic Film Festival that began on March 2 and runs through Sunday.
The event is being organized by the Danish Cultural Center, the Nordic embassies and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.
The movies highlight women's right to equality in society, employment and personal relationships, striking a chord with the Chinese audience.
Tora Mkandawire Martens, director of Martha and Niki, says she hopes young people will be inspired by the films being shown and learn to "stand up for what they want".
"The challenge is to overcome the perspective that you only see women as women and men as men. Instead, you should see them as human beings, and individuals," she says, adding that it should apply to every field.
"When I go to the office of a funder, the first thing he or she thinks about me is that I am a woman. We should see beyond this," Martens says.
She has lived in Beijing for one and a half years with her family. When asked what she thinks of gender equality in China, Martens says: "I haven't gone that deep, but I can see the mother's role is really important here."
She says she often sees both grandmothers and grandfathers playing with their grandchildren in parks, which is a nice thing.
Martha and Niki take part in a hip-hop dancing competition in the documentary. [Photo provided to China Daily]
A short film, Atelier, tells the story of two women who lived in the same house on an island. The younger one prefers isolation and serenity, but the elder woman is an experimental sound artist and likes conversations. At the end of the 30-minute film, the younger woman is shown turning on a tap to submerge her co-tenant's stereo equipment in water, which forces her to leave.
The film was a graduation work of Icelandic Elsa Maria Jakobsdottir, who studied at the National Film School of Denmark. Atelier won Iceland's Edda Award for best short film in 2018, and received more than 200,000 views online in just two to three days.
Huang Ying, 24, a cashier in Beijing, says as an office worker, she can understand one of the character's longing for quietness, but the film's ending left her "a little confused".
Jakobsdottir says she aims to create female characters that challenge stereotypical portrayals of women on screen.
There is a tendency in popular culture to show major female characters as "superhuman".
"It causes a lot of social pressure if those are the pictures of women we are going to depict," Jakobsdottir says.
"I also want to see films with female characters who are complicated, broken, selfish, don't do the right thing and make terrible choices."
Eric Messerschmidt, director of the Danish Cultural Center, says the event aims to discuss gender equality, and in particular, the role and condition of women in art and culture.
"More than any other creative industry, the film industry ... is undergoing a major shift in the recognition, redistribution and representation of women in front of and behind the camera," he adds.
