In September 2010 African women filmmakers met with taz editor, German author and journalist Ines Kappert, who also took the time to interview German intellectual, filmmaker and feminist academic Christina von Braun and Sudanese filmmaker Taghreed Elsanhouri. While debate about the state of filmmaking on the continent continues, especially for women practitioners, there is an increasing demand for stories which capture authentic perspectives and reveal how women from the continent narrate stories from an African point of view. Within the framework of the three-day ‘ARTSWork: Meeting of African Women Filmmakers’ conference, Elsanhouri and von Braun met to discuss what it means to take a camera in one's hand as a woman in the Sudan and why feminism has a bad reputation in African societies.

INES KAPPERT: In your films and in your work in general, the gender perspective and negotiations between men and women play an important role. Would you call yourselves feminists?

TAGHREED ELSANHOURI: Only in secret.

CHRISTINA VON BRAUN: Naturally I am a feminist. The term is used almost only in a defamatory sense in the public domain; this is all the more reason to confess to it.

TAGHREED: To label myself a feminist would be counterproductive. We, that is my generation of women between 20 and 40 years old, are all grateful today for what women achieved in the seventies, but in our everyday lives we have learned that we have to proceed more strategically in order to get from A to B. Apart from that, for me as a black woman, race is just as important as gender.

INES [To CHRISTINA]: Younger women, especially, dismiss the feminist movement as a point of reference in the struggle for their own freedom of action remarkably often. Does that annoy you?

CHRISTINA: Annoy? I don't know. If women can't relate to feminism, then they are entitled not to. That doesn't affect me. But, unfortunately, closet feminists de facto put their names to the defamatory attributions to feminism. We shouldn't participate in these derogatory discourses, and that doesn't at all mean adopting an uncritical stance towards women's movements and the different shades of feminism. But of course I understand that it is somewhat different for a Sudanese woman than for myself.