Screenings index

Gangster Girls

dir. Tina Leisch / Austria 2008 / 79’

subtitles: Polish and English

Documentaries / essays City of Borders, Die Koreanische Hochzeitstruhe, Eldorado - Sonntags Abschied, FILM IST. a Girl and a Gun, Gangster Girls, In Comparison, Must Read After My Death, Sleep Furiously, Sweetgrass, The Children of Wehrmacht, The Count and the Comarade, The Sound of Insects – Record of a Mummy Section index

Film description

Nothing is as sweet as crime until you yourself are a victim. A prison for women in Schwarzau. The only one in Austria. What will we see? Probably dangerous criminals, aggressive and foul-mouthed women, submerged in the melancholy and routine of everyday life in small, dark cells. Step by step we will watch their simple activities only to realise after half an hour that there's nothing going on in their lives. There's only emptiness, resignation and all-embracing torpor.That's completely wrong. Even the very beginning of the film shows us an entirely different face of the prisoners. We can see beautiful women, elegantly made-up for the film and the theatre performance they are participating in. The make-up is a mask; it protects the characters from being identified, lets them open up, forget, present themselves. Gangster Girlsis a strictly staged self-presentation. Not only the theatre performance, but every conversation with the characters has a particular, almost artistic composition. The film blurs the border between the theatrical and the individual, and the intimate. We can see creative agitation. Many different emotions are expressed.
Magdalena Sztorc