“That’s the way it was, I couldn’t change that either,” says a nameless boy with wire-rimmed glasses at the beginning of “A Women’s Story.” He means the distribution of roles: the women stayed at home and cooked and the men came home from wage labor and were served. The boy must know, after all, judging by the VHS look of the recording, he grew up in the time when it was “just like that”.
Even with this opening scene, the Ufa documentary “A Women’s Story” hints at a realization that she then stalks step by step in a dense 50 minutes. The impetus is the question of how equal rights are in Germany. Actress Natalia Wörner first travels to the film festival in Cannes for answers.
On the Côte d’Azur, Wörner, who is known from television productions such as “The Diplomat” or “Under Other Circumstances”, meets fellow actors and first asks them what “female empowerment” means to them. The answers from Helen Mirren, Andie MacDowell and Iris Berben are not particularly surprising. For example, the topic of Iris Berben has been with me since the 1960s, she says, and when asked, Berben states: “It’s still with me.” However, the interviews show how behind every actress career lies a story of emancipation from attributions.
During the pandemic, responsibility automatically shifted to women
Natalia Wörner, born in 1967, grew up in a household with four generations of women. A veritable “matriarchy,” she says. At that time, all the women in her family had exemplified the freedom to decide how one would like to live. Their tales are accompanied by grainy Super 8 footage from Wörner’s childhood near Stuttgart, accompanied by the song “Natural Woman” by Carole King, a touching self-empowerment ballad. Wörner talks about how the “responsibility to do everything” during the pandemic “moves almost naturally towards women in a funnel shape”. She sees the danger that “we will fall back into old structures” and then she embarks on a journey through the Germany of strong female figures in business, politics, science and show business to ask how they experience it.
There is no other way to put it: these selected women are a single parade of impressive role models. It starts with the actress Thelma Buabeng, who talks about the roles she was offered on German stages at the beginning of her career as a black woman: cleaning lady, prostitute, slave. In two or three sentences, she then explains the concept of intersectional feminism, and hey presto, Wörner travels on. In less than an hour, she meets a successful supervisory board member, an activist, a federal minister, a crime scene inspector, an influencer and a human rights activist, among others. One would have liked to know what women say about Wörner’s questions, who are not as powerful as a federal minister, but these do not appear in the documentary.
After all: The fact that Wörner then ends up with the social scientist Jutta Allmendinger, who not only shows her the saber and helmet of the honorary doctorate from the University of Tampere, but also explains the concept of the fourfold disadvantage of women in wages, care work, position and pension, gives the whole thing a beneficial factual foundation.
This emotionalizing nostalgia of the repeatedly used Super 8 optics is not very original and rather unnecessary, but it does not detract from the documentary’s claim: “A Women’s Story” is a compact and entertaining crash course in feminism and is clearly an event on private television. With the prominent cast, the documentary will probably reach a few more people than the next feminist release in publishing programs. And just as bite-sized as she served up her arguments, they can easily be thrown into the next kitchen table discussion, including the insight indicated at the beginning: it won’t be enough if only women emancipate themselves. For something to change, surprise, men would have to do the same.
A Women’s Storyon RTL+.
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