Local Funding and Global Movement: Minority Women's Filmmaking and the German Film Landscape of the Late 1990s

Abstract

The German cinema landscape of the 1990s was characterized by two major trends: one featured international mainstream successes with post-feminist representations of strong female heroines, and the other consisted of a new independent minority cinema, identified by the German feuilleton primarily as male. For minority cinema directed by women, these trends create expectations and pressures, which are often expressed through the identity politics of funding decisions. Two films from the period, Seyhan Derin's I Am My Mother's Daughter (1996) and Fatima El-Tayeb and Angelina Maccarone's film Everything Will Be Fine (1997), subvert the implicit and explicit expectations of their funding by reworking traditional genres and employing narratives of movement that reconfigure notions of identity.