India's Daughter focus of China film festival

A screen shot from India's Daughter. [File photo]

The challenge to stem gender inequality is daunting not just for India as the UN World's Women Report for 2015 and other recent national findings suggest.

"Availability of data (worldwide) on violence against women has increased significantly in recent years," the UN report says.

More than 125 million girls and women alive today have been subjected to female genital mutilation across countries in Africa and the Middle East where this specific form of violence against women is concentrated, it adds.

According to the US National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey 2010 Report, nearly one in five women and one in 71 men in that country have been raped at some time in their lives, including attempted and completed rape. And, more than half of the women victims of rape reported being assaulted by an intimate partner.

In China, domestic violence is a serious problem. The All-China Women's Federation, a government agency, says one in four married women faces some sort of violence at home. Last year, China drafted its first law against abuses in the family.

Udwin's film puts the number of female victims of sexual crimes in the United States to 17.7 million, without the mention of a time period.

Organizers of the China Women's Film Festival that opened in Beijing on Sept 19, and will run through the coming months, say this year, the main entries relate to violence and discrimination against women, feminism, women filmmakers and lesbians.

The festival opened with Lotus, a Chinese feature by director Liu Shu that tells the story of a language arts teacher who moves from as mall town to Beijing only to live in a basement, fending off a potential sex attack.

Among other Chinese films is the documentary We Are Here, which reveals how the lesbian movement gathered steam in China - starting from an under ground nightclub.

Other than the British production India's Daughter, the festival's foreign participants include Japan's Lily Festival, a humor-filled take on sexuality among the elderly, with its heroines between the ages of 69 and 91, US documentary Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock, which is about the life and times of a forgotten African-American civil rights activist from Arkansas and Germany's It Happened Just Before, a documentary that sheds light on trafficking in women and girls.