Femme: Women Healing the World

Produced by actress Sharon Stone, Femme largely consists of philosophical statements about the dramatic positive impact that women are about to have on culture and society by becoming a worldwide moral force. Directed by Emmanuel Itier, the documentary cobbles together interviews with Nobel Peace Prize laureates, a social scientist, an evolutionary biologist, Gloria Steinem, and several actresses, alongside New Age visionaries, futurists, theorists, and other thinkers who share their ideas about the power of the feminine. Arguing that goddess-worshipping cultures were generally peaceful and tended to foster cooperation between the sexes—before patriarchal invaders imposed commerce, rivalry, and greed—the assorted commentators here envision a future in which energy is free, bartering replaces current “masculine” forms of currency, and peace reigns—because women will say, “Stop! That's enough! No more war!” Women must show men the way forward as they “give birth to the greater self” and “surrender to wisdom.” A dizzying array of images fly past, culled from news footage, educational films, and stock footage—Richard and Pat Nixon epitomize cooperative male-female relationships; comments about girls denied an education run over a clip of a fashionably thin woman jogging on the beach. And in an arguably odd choice for a documentary with serious intentions, sweeping questions, and provocative ideas, the words “Are women rising to become the new pharaohs?” appear in a text crawl up the screen à la Star Wars. Intermittently intriguing but ultimately disappointing, this is an optional purchase. Aud: C, P. (M. Puffer-Rothenberg)