Do Women Make Harsher Films? Isa Willinger Interview on ‘No Mercy’

“Women make the harsher films.” Kira Muratova, the pioneering Soviet, and later Ukrainian, filmmaker made that comment when German director Isa Willinger (Hi, AI. Love Stories From the Future; Plastic Fantastic) just started her career and visited her in Odesa towards the end of Muratova’s career. But the thought stuck with Willinger, the author of a monograph on Muratova.

And she dives deep to explore it in her third feature documentary No Mercy, which recently premiered at Filmfest Hamburg and screens at Austria’s Viennale this week, Thursday and Friday, before traveling to DOC NYC for its North American premiere on Nov. 13 and following screenings.

“What does ‘harshness’ mean, both in cinema and in reality? What defines female filmmaking?” asks a synopsis on the Viennale’s festival website. “Do women see the world differently? And what about the much-debated (and misused) ‘female gaze’?” Willinger’s film essay, which she narrates herself, features interviews with more than a dozen directors, including Virginie Despentes, Céline Sciamma, Catherine Breillat, Alice Diop, Joey Soloway, Monika Treut, Ana Lily Amirpour, Apolline Traoré, and Nina Menkes.

“No Mercy weaves together a tapestry of personal narratives, including accounts of real-life violence, which intertwine with professional reflections on power structures and how women carve out spaces to establish distinct cinematic languages or whole new qualities of harshness,” concludes the synopsis.

Willinger talked to THR‘s global business editor Georg Szalai about her cinematic deep dive, the lineup of filmmakers she managed to talk to, and what’s next for her.

You mention early on in No Mercy that comment from Kira Muratova to you about female filmmakers having a harsher approach. Can you talk a little bit about that experience and how much this comment made you think right away or how you returned to it later in your career as a key question?

Definitely, the question about perspectives in cinema and how some films by certain women directors touched me in a particular and more complete way, or touched spaces in me that hadn’t been really spoken to before, was an experience I had when I was a university student. When I discovered the films of Kira Muratova at the beginning of my 20s, I realized that they were so different. There is a woman talking to me somehow, even though her films are not overtly feminist. But yet, there was a different sort of perspective, a different way she treated female characters, even though I couldn’t really put my finger on what exactly it was. 

Later, I interviewed Muratova, and when she made this statement about women’s cinema, I thought it was funny, because toughness or harshness in films by women as their main trait was unexpected to me. She caught me by surprise, I think, but I also had many more questions about her film language, and so I didn’t inquire further. 

But, yeah, it kind of stuck with me. And so, years later, when I was thinking we are missing a documentary on women directors, I thought, what could the angle be? I remembered: “Didn’t Muratova say something about women’s cinema that was provocative and interesting? And I went back to look for it in the interview, because I couldn’t quite remember the way she said it exactly. And I found it and then proposed it to my commissioning editor. 

And you got the green light right away?

I was sure she would decline. First of all, Kira Muratova is not a household name. Second of all, this observation of hers, or hypothesis, seemed so far out that I thought they would never do that. But the opposite happened. The commissioning editor, Anne-Kathrin Brinkmann, loved it, and her colleagues loved it. And then, it became this film. 

So, was No Mercy commissioned for TV or a streamer?

In Germany and most European countries, theatrical or feature documentaries are usually co-produced and co-financed with television.

The lineup of filmmakers you talked to for No Mercy is impressive. How easy or difficult was it to get all these names in front of the camera?

It was actually not easy to get these women. First of all, film directors love to be in control of movies, and they know what it means to not be in control. So, some declined because they did not want to be in front of a camera. I think it’s even more so with women. I think with men, it probably would have been a bit easier, because men tend to like to hear themselves talk. 

Dammit, I recognize myself in that…

And that’s not a bad thing. Women often should be more sure of themselves and happy to be out there. But yeah, it wasn’t easy, but we got a lot of the directors that I had on my list, so I’m super happy with the cast we got in the end. It took a lot of emailing, calling agents, calling this or that producer. It was a long process.

You could probably do a sequel with such names as Coralie Fargeat and Julia Ducournau and others, if they are not too busy…

That’s another challenge: some of them are so busy. I also tried Julia Ducournau, but she never responded. It was a pity, because as I was working on the film, Titane came out in Cannes, and it seemed to affirm something about what we were talking about.

Where do you stand right now on the question of whether female filmmakers make harsher movies? I loved that you feature different voices and opinions in No Mercy.

I think it’s one of the strengths of the movie to not give you a clear answer. I decided I wanted a playful approach to the topic. We’re circling that question and looking at it from different angles, from a historical angle at one point, from a sociological angle at another point. That’s what I really like about it. 

It’s also important for this topic because it’s so easy to fall into the trap of saying, “Oh, women are like this or like that,” like, “They’re not loving, they’re actually super tough.” 

That’s a generalization, whereas in reality, humans are extremely multifaceted and can be so many things. So, the important thing about this film is maybe to open up spaces of imagination and unhinge certain cliches or stereotypes we have in our minds. That opening up is important. 

Why has Muratova been so influential for you, and how easy is it to find her films?

She was very well known in the Soviet Union. She was one of the most important, or maybe the most important, woman director in the Soviet Union and one of the big names of Soviet auteur cinema, along with [Andrei] Tarkovsky and [Alexander] Sokurov and [Sergei] Parajanov, and yet, she is more forgotten than the other people. 

That has several reasons. Her films are very hard to find with subtitles. Also probably because she was a woman director, and there has not been as much of a spotlight on women artists. Another part of the reason was that she didn’t really like interacting much with the public or promoting her work. She always said that as a director, she wanted to disappear behind her films. 

Also, she was in Odesa, Ukraine. She wasn’t in the capitals, Kiev or Moscow, the big centers of Soviet and Russian filmmakers.

What speaks to you when you watch her films?

First of all, it’s her humor. It’s an absurd, grotesque humor. It’s actually not so common in women’s filmmaking to be so grotesque. She also has a particularly striking visuality. She loves images,
but the beauty in her films is always very eccentric. 

Women and the love of images – that’s an interesting topic anyway. Back when I read Laura Mulvey’s famous examination of the male gaze, that spectacle in front of the camera for the male pleasure of looking, I found it quite sexist. Of course, I appreciate Mulvey for all she did for feminist film theory, yet why can women not be considered to have that same pleasure of looking? And in Kira Muratova’s films, I found that pleasure of merely looking, looking at funny things, grotesque things, colorful things. It’s like a circus. 

Do you consider yourself a feminist or feminist filmmaker?

I would call myself a feminist in general. I guess anything I do then is, in a way, feminist, even though it’s not the topic in each one of my films. Yet it’s always there in the way you choose your protagonist and the way you treat them, and so on. It’s always part of it. I mean, being a feminist is actually being a humanist.

Given all the debate around AI, I wanted to ask you about your 2019 film Hi, AI. Love Stories From the Future, which focused on relationships between humans and humanoid robots. What’s your perspective on AI?

I’m still super interested in AI. I’m actually developing a new project on AI right now, on AI safety questions. Regarding filmmaking, it’s clear that AI is going to pose a huge danger to every aspect of filmmaking. Already, animators are losing their jobs because it’s now done by AI, and soon, everything can be done perfectly by AI.

The big question is: Do we let it happen? Or do we pull the brakes and say, “Hey, we still can make decisions.” We can make decisions and create laws, and say, “We don’t want this. We don’t want all these people losing their jobs and losing a sense of meaning with them.” If all that creative work gets lost to AI, that’ll be a huge cultural crisis of loss of meaning. 

Is there anything else you would like to highlight?

No Mercy is also a film about violence. Violence against women is actually on the rise. For a couple of years, the statistics that are coming out show more violence, more rapes, more murders, femicides. In Germany, every day, one woman is being murdered by her husband, boyfriend, whatever. 

What happens in No Mercy is that we talk about these things, yet we don’t talk about them through victimhood. We talk about them through an angle of agency, of strength, of empowerment, of retaliation and shooting back, but mostly of shooting back with a camera.