SATURday, March 16 / 3:30 pm / Ottawa Art Gallery
Program: Tiger Stripes, interactive talk with Saffron Maeve
Maker Market / 12:00 PM - 4:00 PM / Ottawa Art Gallery
Featuring six local woman- and queer-owned businesses, “The Female Gaze” x Maker Market is an event aimed at empowering and supporting women. Browse curated collections of clothing, jewellery, and art while sipping a beverage (alcoholic or non-alcoholic). Inspired by the program's featured film Tiger Stripes, IFFO will be collecting boxes of period products to donate to the Ottawa Food Bank. Tiger Stripes ticket holders receive a complimentary drink ticket.
“The Female Gaze” \
IFFO programmer Tish Black created “The Female Gaze” screening series to focus on women not just behind the camera, but also on-screen and in the audience. The film and thematic talk of each screening explore, with the audience, the personal and cultural significance of films created by, about, and for women.
For this year’s program at IFFO, Tish invites Toronto-based film critic Saffron Maeve to discuss the featured film Tiger Stripes and the inherent power of girls (and the forces of repression) as seen in films. Young Zaffan finds her body changing unexpectedly after she begins menstruating. As she embraces her newfound sense of power, she faces friends, family, and a society determined to tear her down and deny her true nature.
Girls will be girls tigers. Or werewolves. Or mutants. Or witches. It’s an ancient narrative, from folk tales to novels to film and TV. Young women become powerful and transform. But a patriarchal society cannot abide a powerful girl, so she is labelled evil or wrong and punished or cast out. But what happens when women tell these stories of girls’ transformation? With a “female gaze”? Girls can become powerful witches fighting the real demons of the world. They can become superheroes who save the world. In films, these magical, fantastical, powerful girls and women can become role models and examples of what girls can do with their inherent power.
Centred around Tiger Stripes, Tish and Saffron, along with the audience, will discuss the inherent power of girls, the patriarchal systems that suppress them, how we relate (or not) to powerful girls on screen, and, of course, how the so-called “female gaze” affects all this in film.
Feature presentation \
Tiger Stripes
2023 / 95 minutes / Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, France, Germany, Netherlands, Indonesia, Qatar
Director: Amanda Nell Eu
Writers: Amanda Nell Eu, Samm Haillay
Languages: Malayalam
Subtitles: English
body \ friendship \ power
Zaffan is a carefree 12-year-old girl who makes dance videos in the school bathroom, splashes about in the river, and runs home in her underclothes. When she begins menstruating for the first time, before any of her friends have, her body and her life begin to change. She scratches at her skin like she is itching to get out of it. Her friends tell her a cautionary tale of a girl who got her period and went crazy, running into the jungle, never to return. She hides her changing body under her school uniform as her friends become distant. She becomes angry. The jealousy that was underlying her friendship with Farah becomes fuel for an attack against Zaffan. A Facebook-famous “doctor” is brought in to examine the contagious hysteria of the girls at school, embodying the patriarchal society that demonizes girls and women who act out. But there is no demon within Zaffan; only the growing power of a teenage girl, which cannot be contained. Awarded the Grand Prize by the La Semaine de la Critique Jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, Tiger Stripes unleashes the monster within. At turns horrific and funny, director and writer Amanda Nell Eu’s debut feature film is an incredibly raw and powerful tale of a young woman claiming her feelings, her body, and her autonomy.
- Tish Black
PRESS
'Tiger Stripes,' Malaysian Film at Cannes unveils Fiesty First Trailer
AWARDS
Cannes Film Festival, 2023, Critics Week Grand Prize
Fantasia Film Festival, 2023, New Flesh Award for Best First Feature
Neuchatel International Fantastic Film Festival, 2023, Best Feature Film