“No Mercy”: Women Who Speak Out at the 28th TIDF

The 28th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival has honoured filmmaker Vouvoula Skoura with the Honorary Golden Alexander, hosted the premiere of the first film directed by actress Juliette Binoche, and dedicated significant space to highlighting female figures who, both in front of and behind the camera, have shaped contemporary cultural history.

No Mercy

The documentary No Mercy (2025), a German production directed by Isa Willinger and premiered last year at Filmfest Hamburg, is a rigorous and compelling work that originated from an interview the director conducted years ago with the cult filmmaker Kira Muratova, who stated that women make harsher films.

This remark, which lingered in Willinger’s mind for years, led her to revisit the filmographies of several female directors in order to question the persistent assumption that empathy and sensitivity are defining or stable traits in women’s filmmaking.

Ana Lily Amirpour in No Mercy (Isa Willinger, 2025)

Throughout her film essay, the director of Love Stories From the Future examines whether Muratova’s statement holds true and how both legendary filmmakers and emerging directors—some of whom have launched remarkable careers with films as striking as Saint Omer—respond to this idea.

Through filmed interviews with Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, 2014), Catherine Breillat, Jackie Buet, Margit Czenki, Virginie Despentes, Alice Diop, Valie Export, Nina Menkes, Marzieh Meshkini, Mouly Surya, Céline Sciamma, Joey Soloway, Monika Treut, and Apolline Traoré, as well as film excerpts from other directors, Willinger shows how the female gaze asserts itself and claims its place within society.

Themes such as violence, revenge, sexual and social agency, and the assertion of a space of one’s own—within a cinematic tradition historically dominated by male references—have pushed films directed by women toward the creation of a distinctive language, characters, and narratives. The cinema of Chantal Akerman, Catherine Breillat, or Kira Muratova, for instance, portrays women who are assertive, violent, vengeful, rebellious, or simply as capable of asserting themselves in the world as any man.

Ask E. Jean 

The festival’s opening film was itself a clear statement of intent. Ask E. Jean (2025), directed by Ivy Meeropol, recounts how, at the beginning of the 21st century, journalist E. Jean Carroll pursued legal action against Donald Trump after being sexually assaulted in a fitting room at Bergdorf Goodman. She did so in two separate cases: first for sexual assault and later for defamation.

Carroll’s career has been as brilliant as it was audacious. Strikingly beautiful—once named “Cheerleader of America”—she ventured boldly into some of the most challenging areas of journalism at a time when very few women, like Joan Didion, dared to approach such subjects from a female perspective in publications traditionally dominated by men, such as Playboy or Esquire.

Ask E. Jean (Eivi Meeropool, 2025).

Her celebrated reports on female sexuality and in-depth interviews—such as the one conducted with Hunter S. Thompson on his own turf—remain, to this day, exemplary models of sociopolitical reportage about life in America. For years, E. Jean wrote what became the longest-running advice column in Elle—a precursor of sorts to Carrie Bradshaw’s famous column in Sex and the City. At the same time, her sustained work redefining the dynamics between the sexes and advocating for women’s emancipation turned her into a national symbol of courage and self-awareness.

The documentary Ask E. Jean, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Hot Springs Documentary Festival in 2025, traces the journalist’s career in order to situate her professionalism and forthright, courageous character against the secret she kept for years out of fear of not being believed. In 2019, she published the bestseller What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, in which she described in detail the assault she suffered at the hands of the current President of the United States. In 2023, a court ruling awarded the journalist $88.3 million in damages, although she has yet to receive the compensation, as the case remains under appeal.

Broken English

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard (20,000 Days on Earth, 2025) have created a singular documentary framed within a fictional narrative that serves as a playful echo of This Is Your Life, dedicated to the formidable Marianne Faithfull. From the imagined Ministry of Not Forgetting, the characters played by Tilda Swinton and George MacKay examine the life and legacy of the actress, composer and singer in her presence, reconstructing it through archival footage, interviews and press material.

Faithfull’s legendary trajectory—and the dramatic fluctuations of her fame, particularly in the United Kingdom, where tabloids and television first cast her as a perfect angel before later vilifying her for her addictions, suicide attempt, overdoses and fiercely independent life—becomes the object of scrutiny. The film sets out to determine whether her life deserves that state of “not forgetting”—something distinct from mere remembrance—that the fictional ministry’s officials are tasked with granting.

Her album Broken English, a decisive turning point both in her life and career, lends its title to this unusual documentary, which premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. The film also features appearances—playing themselves—by Suki Waterhouse, Beth Orton, Courtney Love, Jehnny Beth, Nick Cave, and Warren Ellis. This retrospective look at Marianne Faithfull’s life and work places her at the center of the narrative, allowing her to clarify or comment on the most pivotal episodes of her story. Frail, assisted by oxygen yet still strikingly beautiful and commanding, she reflects with the serenity of age on her own trajectory. She was unable to complete the filming, however, passing away on January 30, 2025.

Broken English functions at once as a tribute, a vindication, and a kind of swan song for an artist who defined her era—a figure who could only have emerged in a moment of intense cultural vitality and social transgression such as the one she inhabited. Yet above all, she managed to survive it, reinventing herself with intelligence and talent, ultimately earning a place of honor in that imagined—or perhaps very real—Ministry of Not Forgetting.