“Amazon…member of a fabled tribe of female warriors,” reads the dictionary definition quoted at the start of Thaïs Odermatt’s prize-winning feature doc, Urban Amazons. The film is intended as is a paean to strong women. It celebrates modern-day Amazons – females living in Berlin who have all fought to overcome sexist stereotyping.
The subjects include DJ Sara; Maryna Ivasho, a young MMA fighter; Zilan, a young mother who once fought as a Kurdish guerrilla, and Irmela, an elderly local celebrity whose new vocation is to scrub right wing graffiti and stickers from the city’s walls and lampposts.
These are all women who live by their own rules, have the capacity to endure physical strain and are trail blazers in their own fields.
Zilan has seen combat in a real war. Marina, whom the director accompanies to a bout in Ukraine, is testing herself through physical combat in the ring. As a DJ, Sara has been carving out a reputation in an underground music world almost entirely dominated by men. The director cross-cuts between their stories. She talks of creating “a collective mosaic.”
“It was during my studies in Berlin. I felt a smell in the air,” the Swiss director remembers how she first came up with the idea for the documentary back in 2016. This was just before President Trump had been elected in the US and just before the #MeToo movement surged in size in the wake of the Weinstein scandal. “Women wanted to change something…I found friends in Berlin talking about the issue.”
Alongside the footage of the women in Berlin, Odermatt uses archive footage – and some personal material from her own life. “I was pregnant when we were shooting…then I started editing after [the birth],” she explains. The birth of her daughter had been “painful…strange, something so strong in my life. In this moment, I was a fighter!”
Urban Amazons is the director’s graduate film from her Masters at Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf – and had already won a Best Graduate film award at the Swiss Film “Oscars” in advance of its international premiere at DOK.fest Munich this month.
The documentary was actually finished in February 2020. It had been invited to a festival in Argentina but then Covid intervened. The director was denied the chance to show her film physically. Thankfully, it has now secured distribution in Switzerland through Cineworx and should finally appear in Swiss cinemas in June.
After Urban Amazons, Odermatt is preparing something completely different, an animated/hybrid film that will also use found footage. It has the intriguing title: Tapeworm Alexis & Maria Callas, and is about the opera diva, known for her beauty, fashion sense and svelte figure, as well as for her remarkable voice.
“There is a legend about Maria Callas that she had a worm that was in her stomach and eating [her insides]…when she was young, she was quite fat. She lost 30 kilos in half a year,” the director explains the surrealistic premise of the new project.
The story follows Alexis, a tapeworm who burrows his way into the guts of Callas. Once lodged there, he manages to reproduce. Thanks to him, Callas becomes slim and blossoms forth as one of the 20th Century’s greatest style icons. However, as Odermatt explains, a “dangerous dependency” develops between the parasite and its host.
The animation will be used to depict events inside Callas’ stomach…but the director will be using archive and found footage to show the external world.
