Isa Willinger Interview: No Mercy Documentary Questions “Harshness” in Femme Filmmaking

“I thought a film like that is missing that for some reason,” says Willinger. “We don’t really have many documentaries—or hardly any—where women film directors are talking about their works and why they’re making certain choices.”

Looking for an angle for the film, Willinger recalled Muratova’s phrasing and set about to explore it, enlisting the perspectives of thirteen women and one nonbinary filmmaker.

Willinger’s film brings together directors whose works have carved new grammars of desire, power, and cinematic revolt: Ana Lily Amirpour, Catherine Breillat, Alice Diop, Marzieh Meshkini, Mouly Surya, Céline Sciamma, Nina Menkes, and others who have refused the safe, the sentimental, or the neatly redemptive. Conversations with the directors are woven together with archival footage, excerpts from their films, and a throughline narration by Willinger.

The Process of Remembering: Unearthing Forgotten Film History

No Mercy began in pandemic isolation, when Willinger found herself unable to shoot but able to watch — hundreds of films by women and nonbinary directors. She retraced Muratova’s steps to 1988, when the Soviet auteur attended Créteil International Women’s Film Festival in France. The films she saw there inspired Muratova’s remark to Willinger about the harsh-edge of women’s films. Willinger contacted the festival’s founder, Justine Bruet, the sole non-filmmaker subject interviewed in the film, who scanned the 1988 festival program for Willinger by hand. From there began a detective work that revealed how much of women’s film history has simply vanished.

“I tried to find all the films, tried to watch them, but actually, a lot of the films from then… you cannot find them anymore,” Willinger says.

Yet many discoveries of forgotten radical films and filmmakers still ensued from her research.

“I try to put things into my films that I hadn’t known about myself before,” Willinger says. “I found the Austrian artist Valie Export, a world-famous feminist artist. I had no idea that she was actually, in the ’70s and ’80s, a feature filmmaker, and she had several big feature films playing at Berlinale.”

Archival footage of Export’s controversial TAPP und TASTKINO (Tapp and TOUCH CINEMA) (1968) shows Export wearing a box, inviting passersby to put their hands in the box and touch her bare breasts.

Willinger also interviewed Margit Czenki, director of Komplizinnen (1987), a film based on her own experience of going to prison for robbing a prison.

“We used to say, ‘Better to rob a bank than own a bank!’” Czenki laughs in the film.

Pushing the Form, Challenging Assumptions

Not surprisingly, and in alignment with Muratova’s own rebellious spirit, the directors often challenged Willinger during the interviews. Pushing back on the broad concept of the “female gaze,” Alice Diop (Saint Omer) notes, “We’ve been talking for twenty minutes” without mentioning race. Willinger embraced the nuanced perspectives they offered, weaving them into the film’s multi-faceted exploration of Muratova’s prompting remark about the harshness of women’s cinema.

“Something that I found wonderful was when Celine Sciamma — she sort of flipped the whole narrative,” Willinger says of the Portrait of a Lady On Fire director. “When I was interviewing her, she didn’t want to talk about violence at all, and harshness. She was like, ‘Leave me alone. I’ve left this shit behind me. It’s just the patriarchal language of cinema.’”

At the time of the interview, Willinger struggled to know how to incorporate this response into the story she was seeking to tell.

“But then after the interview,” Willinger admits, “I realized that she actually had given me so much more than I could have even expected, and the way she’s…  a philosopher of film, the way she conceptualizes the kind of film language that is not so conflict-based.”

To this point, Sciamma shares the story of sending the script for Petit Maman (2021) to a screenwriter friend, who critiqued it for the lack of explicit conflict. Sciamma defends her film, pointing to the range of emotions experienced by the characters and the audience.

When made aware that Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire — the first woman-directed film in Letterboxd’s top 250 — sits all the way down at #38, Willinger was surprised, but not shocked.

“I think it’s still pretty rare for men to recommend movies by women,” she says. “Somehow, they just don’t have the same recognition. They aren’t as cool or sexy.”

If Willinger could change one thing for women and nonbinary filmmakers, it’s simply that they receive as much respect as men.

It is to be noted that Joey Soloway is the sole nonbinary filmmaker in No Mercy, among a group that skews queer and older overall. Yet when asked how Williger anticipates younger generations to receive the film, she says, “I think everybody is nonbinary in a way… we’re all on a [gender] spectrum in a way. For me, there’s no actually strict lines. I know that language sometimes forces us to talk in certain ways, for political reasons, to make known that there are more identities than just two, so that’s important that we use certain words.”

“I hope that the young people can also connect with the thoughts [in the film] that are deconstructing stereotypes,” she continues. “You know what Alice Diop says about the female gaze, for example, or what Celine Sciamma says about the binary logic of film language and trying to find different ways of telling a story and so on. Even though she doesn’t identify as nonbinary, I think what she says connects to so many things that the younger people that are gender-fluid are thinking about, about crossing certain lines and overcoming binaries.”

The cultural “rollback” of recent years, she noted, makes the film’s release all the more charged.

“Things were more hopeful when I started working on it,” she said.

Personal Layers, Historical Significance

The final piece of the filmmaking process was Willinger’s own understated narration — one she had to be coaxed to include.

“That was actually the hardest part,” she says. “I didn’t want to be the center of the film.”

But as her team worked on the edit, they realized something was missing.

“I had a very good script consultant at one point with a producer, Paula Vasquero, and she told me that, ‘If I don’t understand your motivation, I don’t understand the film,’” comments Williger.

In order to write a narration grounded in her connection to the material, Willinger went back to her own personal history not just with the project, but with filmmaking.

“I wanted it to be sparse enough to not be like overpowering and become the central element.” Willinger’s economical narration bookends the film, with brief intermittent voice-over that largely serves to introduce key questions for each section.

For Willinger, making No Mercy rekindled an interest in explicitly feminist themes.

“I reconnected a lot to that feminist energy that I felt in my mid or late 20s, ” she says.

One of Willinger’s student films, briefly excerpted in No Mercy, is a documentary on a porn set inspired by Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze. It already hinted at this throughline: a fascination with gaze, body, and power, and with the possibility of reclaiming pleasure itself.

If Muratova’s hypothesis that women make harsher films still resists resolution, No Mercy doesn’t mind. The insights and personal experiences offered by the filmmakers create an illuminating catharsis: a rich range of emotions bubbles up in the conversations and encapsulates the many essences of their films. It shows that women and nonbinary filmmakers, far from being a gentle corrective to the limitations of their male counterparts, have always contained complexities and contradictions too nuanced to easily summarize.

“To make films is to break silence,” Willinger writes in her director’s statement. “Everything the #MeToo movement brought into focus, women directors had been addressing all along.”

For audiences new to Kira Muratova’s work, Willinger suggests starting with The Tuner, (2004) “because it’s very funny, comical, and has a more classical narrative, so it’s quite accessible.” She also suggests The Long Farewell (1971), which she described as “beautiful,” and The Asthenic Syndrome (1989), “just to get an understanding of how crazy and taboo-breaking she could be.”

No Mercy had its North American premiere at DOC NYC on November 13th, 2025. It is seeking US distribution.

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