Certain Women

Rotterdam regular and renegade punk feminist of the US low-budget film scene Peggy Ahwesh has joined forces with acclaimed video artist Bobby Abate to adapt populist Southern genre writer Erskine Caldwell’s 1957 novel Certain Women. A typical ‘pulp’ novelist, Caldwell nevertheless had a proto-feminist perspective on his small town American characters, as they struggle to escape provincial hypocrisy and moral values and achieve sexual expression, stability and independence. Abate and Ahwesh, enthusiasts of the exaggerated, the off-beat and the tongue-in-cheek, approach their low-brow subject with gusto, exploiting the visual potential of low-end video formats, like spy-cam and DV to give their interpretation a raw look and energy. They combine an almost lyrical vision of the small town and its locations with a series of interludes with the four heroic young women, played by non-professionals. These four women are struggling to gain their independence in a working class town fuelled by ignorance, wickedness and vicious rumours and in which gossip about their sexual adventures is rife. Combining long travelling shots of the landscape of the town with sometimes lurid, strange and sexual encounters, the two film makers have forged a new approach to storytelling while keeping in an inspired but also ironically distant relationship with Caldwell’s 1950s pulp original.