W A S S E R H A U S
A R A B I C _ A U S T R I A N _ F I L M P R O J E C T S
Die Fremdgängerin
Her Way to Go
61 years of age, a militant feminist, an important critical voice in the
international art world: Barbara Wally, for almost three decades director of the Salzburg Summer Academy, which was funded by Oskar Kokoschka under the name of "Schule des Sehens" (literally, "school for seeing"), became Muslim.
Between Sanaa, Aden, Salzburg and New York she is leading a life between worlds, and reinvents herself anew.
She is a woman that exchanges art with religion, that marries for the first time in her life and for whom feminism and Islam are no contradictions. A woman who loves a 22 years younger man from Yemen,whom she met when he was her jeep driver.
She shares him with his first wife Fosia and their six children.
Breaking taboos and contradictions, crossing borders and being a
"traitor to her kind". Insight into everyday life: In Sanaa, where tribal tradition, patriarchy and strictly separate lives of men and women are the order of the day, Barbara Wally and her husband Alkhadher set up a travel agency for Yemeni tourism, and, in the harbour city of Aden, we and her visit her husband's family and his first wife Fosia. Barbara, the third of the union, translates what Fosia says. Fosia asmany Yemenites can neither read nor write. Fosia shall not be filmed, only heard.
Which role plays the man in this relationship between two women? What does the female elite say concerning women in Yemen, as exemplified by Nadia Al Sakaff, editor of the Yemen Times?
This is a film about a courageous relationship, about art and religion,
about alienation and proximity, and about risk: to live an open identity
like Barbara Wally lives, to cross borders and to leave questions open.
Can the Yemeni reality of a triangular relationship be unveiled, at all?
Katrin Mackowski
DIRECTOR: Katrin Mackowski CAMERA: Judith Stehlik EDIT: Harald Nestl / Doris Schmid
Production: ORF / MMK / Bernadette Stummer
45 Minuten, A/Y/I 2009
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