“Damned If You Don’t is a real prize. Beautifully shot in black and white, it blends conventional narrative technique with impressionistic camerawork, symbols and voiceovers to create an intimate study of sexual expression and repression. It begins with footage from a stylish old potboiler about an isolated convent, whose tale of passions leashed and unleashed provides the leitmotif for a young lesbian who watches it and the lonely nun she pursues and seduces.
As the two women’s lives come closer to joining, voiceovers from the biography of a 16th century lesbian nun and the reminiscences of a woman’s closeted romances at a Catholic school flesh out the theme. When the two women finally meet and make love, the woman’s careful unwrapping of the nun’s complicated prison of clothing is both foreplay and liberating metaphor. The film is as hypnotic as a dream.”
—Andrew Rasanen, Bay Windows
Awards:
Best Experimental Film Award: Athens Film Festival, Ohio
Best Experimental Narrative Film Award: Atlanta Film Festival
Selected Screenings:
1989 Whitney Biennial, NY; Festival of Festivals, Toronto; Flaherty Film Festival, NY; First Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Budapest; London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival; Virginia Festival of American Film, Charlottesville; Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, Taiwan; Third International Festival of Films by Women, Montreal; “Filmmor” Women’s Film Festival, Turkey; Bangalore Queer Film Festival, India; Pink Screens Film Festival, Brussels; “LIFT: Sixth Festival of Lesbian Identities”, Hungary; Lesbenfilmtage, Freiburg, Germany; 15e Festivale Internationales des Films de Femmes, France; Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, Amsterdam; Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, Denmark; Ninth Olympia Film Festival, Washington; Women in the Director’s Chair, Chicago; “Sexism, Racism and Colonialism: A Corrective Film Series”, NY; Kino Mal’sehen Women’s Film Festival, Frankfurt, Germany; Tyneside International Film Festival, England; Cinematrix Film Festival, Seattle
Damned If You Don’t (1987)
Directed, written, shot and edited by Su Friedrich
Script consulting and set decoration by Cathy Nan Quinlan
Production managing by Peggy Ahwesh
Featuring: Peggy Healey and Ela Troyano
Voiceovers by Makea McDonald, Martina Siebert and Cathy Nan Quinlan
Funded by grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Jerome Foundation and the DAAD
42 minutes, 16mm, b&w