Winner - Golden Eye, Best Film in Focus, Zurich International Film Festival, 2022
Being thrown down a flight of stairs, hit by a car or beaten up is the everyday life of a stuntwoman. For three such stuntwomen, Virginie (Fast & Furious 6), Petra (Westworld, Minority Report) and Estelle (Emily in Paris), who we follow during training sessions and on film sets in France and the US, what does all this pretend violence do to their bodies and minds?
There is always a trade-off between the desire to perform as realistically as possible—and the stuntwomens’ own boundaries, both physically and emotionally. Scenes with cars crashing are thrilling, but the roles in which the women are beaten up are much harder to watch, and sadly much more plentiful. Few action movies have female heroes so they usually play the role of victims. Stuntwomen are hired to endure violence, while the task of their male colleagues is to inflict it.
Driven by a desire to test the limits of their bodies and the outdated roles assigned to women in Hollywood in the wake of the #metoo movement, these stuntwomen are redefining what action looks like in contemporary film but how much violence is too much? With intimacy and intelligence, Stuntwomen asks what the role of violence in cinema is, and how it relates to the hierarchies of gendered bodies so firmly entrenched in filmmaking.
In French, Swiss and English with English subtitles.
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