Not so long ago, the idea of women creating and exhibiting films was more radical than not, as we’re reminded in a new documentary, No Mercy. Making use of her own narration and creative journey, German filmmaker Isa Willinger takes us on a survey through cinema from the perspective of an astonishing number of women directors – although most of them European – encompassing both their films and their own words. The film enjoyed its world premiere at Filmfest Hamburg at the end of September and now plays at the Festival do Rio as part of EFP’s Europe! Voices of Women+ in Film programme.

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Willinger begins with a filmmaker and a question that have driven her cinematic process: Kira Muratova, the late Soviet-era Ukrainian director known for her idiosyncratic style, who said that women are capable of making the harshest, toughest and most violent films. But what does this really mean? The filmmaker thus sets out, through No Mercy, to discover exactly that: does it mean on-screen physical violence or perhaps something psychologically horrifying? And what is violence – is it simply depicting the world through a woman’s view versus that of a patriarchal one?

Through a series of eye-opening – and often themselves shocking – talking-head interviews, Willinger brings up the question of violence in cinema by women. Virginie Despentes, co-director of the cult classic Baise-moi, says she believes that women, of course, can make the most brutal films. Some, like Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Céline Sciamma
scheda film]), say they don’t want to engage in the “systematic presence of violence” on screen – Sciamma doesn’t believe it’s productive. Others prefer to engage in a more subversive way, like Austria’s Valie Export, who shocked male directors with her Tap and Touch Cinema piece: half-performance art, half-film in which she makes the spectator’s hands into their eyes and has the person place them on her breasts (the “screen”). And yet others, like Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), believe in the fundamental misogyny behind the question: nobody ever asks Scorsese why he always has greasy, violent male characters, she jokes.

Even more telling is the fact that many of the interviewees think back to a time when forums like the Films de Femmes festival in Créteil were truly radical, just decades ago, when movies by women directors weren't being supported or shown, and women directors never got to interact. As such, No Mercy becomes most interesting when Willinger uses the doc to reclaim time for the voices of these filmmakers, and to allow them to talk about their films and their personal stories on their turf, at their leisure.

The film does drift quite far from Willinger’s original conceit about Muratova’s claim and the idea of violence and conflict on screen, sometimes leading us to wonder just how much each director really connects to Muratova’s statement beyond the movie’s confines. However, perhaps that’s part of the point: violence of the patriarchy is omnipresent, and often gratuitous and physical, directed against women. When women fight back, anything may be seen as violence – even when it’s simply a revolutionary struggle for emancipation, turning into something joyful.

No Mercy is a German-Austrian production staged by Tondowski Films and FlairFilm, in co-production with ORF Film/Fernseh-Abkommen and ZDF, in collaboration with ARTE.