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IIFF celebrates 10 years
Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe
May 05, 2011

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The International Images Film Festival for Women (IIF) is the only regular women's festival South of the Sahara. This festival provides much needed space for women to tell their stories of their joys, sorrows, triumphs and sadness in a country which has one of the highest rates of abuse of women in the world. And this year, against all odds, IIFF celebrates its 10th Anniversary. So our Zim society cannot be so bad after all!

Ten years is a long time for women to work together in harmony and produce a world-class festival like IIFF. What bonds the Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe together to make sure the festival is a success every year is passion. This passion began in 2002 when the inaugural Miss Malaika beauty contest was held, and soon beauty pageants were springing up all over the country. There was even a Miss Rural Zimbabwe where the girls paraded bare breasted. That might all be well and good: a woman has to earn a living, after all. But IIFF decided to challenge the notion that woman's worth is in her "bare" essentials.

Challenging society's notion of woman as objects of male satisfaction and second-class citizens who can only achieve first class status through personal relationships with men has brought IIFF a long way. In the ten years since IIFF was founded, Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe have celebrated women's passion, women's fighting spirit, women's transformation, women's power. And now this year we celebrate women's goals with our 10th anniversary them Women With Goals. Every woman has her own personal goals and WFOZ will screen films which show how women have persevered and attained those goals. At the same time, the theme for this year's festival, Women With Goals, reflects the United Nations' Millenium Development Goals (MDGs').

Clearly, constituting more than half of Zimbabwe's population, women cannot be removed from the development equation. Equally clearly limiting women's development to MDG 3, which concerns promoting gender equality and empowering women, could cause women to be marginalized with respect to all the other goals. So everybody, come to IIFF 2011, 18-26 November in Harare and 1-3 December in Bulawayo, to find out how women the world over have realized ALL their goals! Working together and sharing ideas, we in Zimbabwe will reach all our goals too!

WILDTRACK with its international and locally trained team will bring you more ideas about what film is, and what makes a good film in our later editions. WILDTRACK is quarterly. So it will appear four times a year. While we wait for these later editions, another sign that Zimbabwean cinema is at a new coming of age state of development is that I WANT A WEDDING DRESS has proved popular not only at home but also elsewhere on our wonderful continent.

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