Asian Premiere | 2015 Tribeca Film Festival - The Third Annual Nora Ephron Prize / 2015 Berlin International Film Festival
 

Synopsis

 Sworn Virgin is the story of a woman who sacrifices her femininity for her freedom, and then decides to wipe out her honour to become a woman again. It is a journey inside the complexity of women’s universe; a film about being stuck in invisible prisons and then finally learning how to breathe.
 

Program Note

 Teenager Hana rebels against the reality of her home country Albania, where women are forced to live degrading and subordinated lives. She resolves to become a \"Sworn Virgin,\" a woman who accepts the life of a man but swears to keep her chastity for life. Turning herself into a male and becoming Mark, Hana wears men\'s clothes and becomes a man in both word and deed and thus earns the freedom previously denied to her when she was a woman. However, her choice becomes another prison with a whole different meaning. During her journey to Italy to visit her cousin Lila, Hana explores her past and present and the vastly different male and female worlds, and even precariously travels across these two distant and different realms. Will her broken, divided soul find salvation and her oppressed physicality liberation? It is no surprise that this film is regarded as an apt emotional and intellectual response to the fundamental and political arguments that have been raised about femininity. Because on one hand, the meticulously planned and executed images and the carefully chosen plot line allow the audience to reflect on the ever expanding and dynamic gender continuum that is often overshadowed by the forced male/female dichotomy, while on the other hand, by weaving into one fabric matters such as identity and essence, physicality and masquerade, desire and impulse, the film also examines how the construct of femininity is composed in the physical, cultural, and psychological sense. [JOO You-shin]