Freedom and Feminism in Jennifer Fox's "Flying"

By Britt Wahlin, AlterNet. Posted June 11, 2008.

All of her life, Jennifer Fox has held freedom above anything else. She has a successful career as a filmmaker and travels around the world. Without a spouse or children, she does as she pleases and sleeps with whom she wants. She has a great loft in New York City, which is frequently populated by her bohemian friends who are like family to her.

But in her early 40s, she begins to wonder where she fits. Though she eschews marriage, she has a relationship with a married man, and the way she feels when he's not there for her is anything but liberating. She thinks she may want children after all. All around her, female friends are experiencing parallel struggles figuring out how love, sex and partnership square with often competing desires for independence: professional, financial and otherwise.

To figure it all out, she turns the camera on herself and invites family, friends, and friends of friends to share their stories, too. "Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman" is the resulting tapestry of narratives, a six-hour meditation on the modern female experience. The women in "Flying" cover a gamut of topics ranging from marriage, motherhood, divorce and sexuality to abortion, infertility, virginity and violence.

The germs of "Flying" came to Fox in the mid-'90s, when it struck her that though she tended to be in relationships with men, her female friendships were holding her together. "I was initially interested in female language, how women communicate with each other," she said. In South Africa, where she was working, her water-cooler conversations with the female members of a mostly male production team always hit on the same topics: love, sex, relationships. "Though we were from different backgrounds, we were experiencing the same things," Fox said. She hypothesized that the themes of modern women's lives cut across race, class and culture, but she wasn't sure how to incorporate her ideas into a compelling film.

A few years later, personal crises propelled her to begin filming what became "Flying."

But she had to figure out how to capture on film the unique way women come together to talk about their lives. It wouldn't work to have a cameraperson filming discussions with friends about their most intimate feelings and experiences -- they might not open up.

She came up with a technique that she calls "passing the camera," in which two or more people pass the camera back and forth and take turns asking questions. Fox believes this equalizes the power dynamic between interviewer and interviewee, and in the intimate setting of a living room or kitchen, passing the camera over a glass of wine or cup of tea, people are more willing to share. Fox used one camera to shoot 1,600 hours of footage for "Flying."

In the film, Fox passes her camera with women from 17 countries. Some women appear throughout the series, such as Pat, Fox's best friend who is diagnosed with a brain tumor; L'dawn, whose perfect marriage devolves into divorce and a years-long legal battle for child support; and Theresa, who discovers she is pregnant after breaking up with her boyfriend; later Theresa gets involved with a man who accepts her baby as his own. There's also Jihan, an Egyptian woman living in France with an international career. When she gets married, her husband agrees to be the primary caregiver of their children so that she does not have to give up her satisfying work that requires frequent travel.

Other women in the film appear in one episode only, such as Paromita, a civil rights lawyer in India who chooses to remain single. Fox also meets with sex workers in Cambodia and Somali refugees living in London who recount their personal stories of undergoing female circumcision.

In India, Fox initiates a discussion about masturbation with a group of widows. The women ask, "How would one do that?" and then break into hysterics at the mere suggestion that they would touch their own bodies for sexual fulfillment in the absence of husbands.

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Britt Wahlin writes freelance stories about gender, health and social-issue media. She works for Ibis Reproductive Health in Cambridge, Mass.