From acclaimed French photographer and director Yann Arthus-Bertrand (Home) and Anastasia Mikova, Woman was produced with NGOs all around the world and with sponsors such as LVMH, Total, and Air France.
The position of women within a country is one of the best indicators of how healthy it is as a society. In broader terms, it might also be the most fitting symbol of humans’ capacity to achieve incredible progress in a very short space of time and of our propensity to equally rapid regression.
Woman was born of a desire to see the world through a woman’s eyes. Then the questions started to flow. What are the stages marking a woman’s passage from little girl to 80-year-old grandma? What are her dreams and hopes as well as her greatest fears and scars? What does she expect of life, society and men? What is a woman’s relationship to her body and to seduction? What part do appearances and beauty play in her life? How does motherhood change her life? What do we know of female desire, and why do certain cultures find it so frightening?
Weak, stupid, talkative, jealous, frivolous and hysterical, or else delicate, sweet, devoted, modest: all these things are allegedly part of a woman’s “nature”. But are they really?
Through the film you will discover the voices of women as you have never heard them before. The film, based on first-person encounters, puts together hundreds of testimonies of very different women, from Heads of States to beauty queens and bus drivers to farmers from remote areas delivering a more comprehensive picture of what it means to be a woman in today’s world. Between testimonies, some artistic will visually extend women’s stories whether by showing women individually in their daily lives or in big gatherings bringing thousands of women together.
The two directors have also collaborated with artists like photographer Peter Lindbergh to explore topics such as women’s relationship with their own body or with the dancers from the Bandaloop collective in a metaphorical dance illustrating women’s strength and capacity to rise up in the sky!
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