FLYING: CONFESSIONS OF FREE WOMAN is a six-part series that takes a personal experimental approach to female life in the 21st century. The series narratively and visually interweaves aspects of filmmaker Jennifer Fox's own life over three years - from 42 to 45 - with the lives of diverse and courageous women from around the globe. In ways that are both humorous and profound, the film searches for new models of femaleness, examining changing gender roles and the efforts of women everywhere to comprehend and define for themselves what it means to be a woman in these times. What are the struggles of women in this era of new sexual and economic freedoms, shifting gender relations, a rise in religious fundamentalism, and AIDS? What have been their journeys to self-definition and self-expression?
Never before in our collective human history have so many women had such freedom to construct a life of their own creation. Yet old structures and realities still haunt us; many women are looking for new role models, but finding them difficult to identify for lack of precedent and because even today women so often remain the invisible, silent class. While social constructs isolate us into subgroups, many women of all ages, classes, and cultures around the world express surprisingly similar concerns and struggles. From South Africa to California, from Sweden to India, the film creates a cross-cultural story about common experiences of modern female life on issues such as love, socialization, marriage, work, childrearing, aging, violence, spirituality, death, politics.
The series takes as a hypothesis that owning and controlling one's own sexuality is the center of a woman's power and self. It also hypothesizes that the inverse is true: if a woman does not control the emotional and sexual life of her own body, she cannot be fully empowered. With all the advances that women have made for themselves, patriarchal systems still exists across the globe. Rarely is a woman fully in control of her own body or her own fate. Often and in some cultures, the subjugation is over female genital mutilation, the veil, lack of access to abortion, dowry, and rape as a tool of warfare. Just as often it is insidious social condemnation of women who take joy in their sexuality, harassment defended as "harmless" flirtation, legislation prohibiting sexual education in schools and the consequences of the subsequent lack of knowledge, the equation of "female" or "feminine" with weak, incompetent or emotionally volatile.
By examining the myriad paths available to women today, the obstacles that still exist, and the consequences of our choices, viewers are challenged to reexamine their own paths and choices. This experimental and experiential drama will be a collective search to make sense of being a woman in the modern world.
