Jane Campion at Cannes

Jane Campion & her Carosse d'Or

It was a proud moment for New Zealanders and Australians last week when Jane Campion received her Carosse d'Or at Cannes. The Carosse d'Or (Golden Coach) prize is a tribute by directors of La Société des Réalisateurs de Films (SRF) to one of their own, chosen from the international filmmaking community for the innovative qualities, courage and independent-mindedness of his or her work.

Jacques Rozier was the first winner when the prize was created in 2002. Subsequent winners were Clint Eastwood, Nanni Moretti, Sembene Ousmane, David Cronenberg, Alain Cavalier, Jim Jarmusch, Naomi Kawase, Agnès Varda, Jafar Panahi et Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

Here's the SRF's list of Jane's films. It helped me to reflect on the full sweep of her work. And then to appreciate, all over again, that while making these films she's also strongly supported other women filmmakers. And then to feel deep gratitude for the way the SRF-identified qualities in her work have spilled over into her activism. Globally, there's no other director who's managed to do this.

1982 An Exercise in Discipline – Peel (short)
1983 Passionless Moments (short)
1984 Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest (video)
A Girl's Own Story (short)
After Hours (short)
1986 Dancing Daze (TV)
1989 Sweetie
1990 An Angel at My Table
1993 The Piano
1996 The Portrait of a Lady
1999 Holy Smoke
2003 In the Cut
2006 The Water Diary (from the film 8)
2009 Bright Star
2013 Top of the Lake (TV)

Pierre Rissient

Because I often wonder about who advocates for and supports successful women filmmakers, I loved reading that Jane Campion dedicated the Carosse d'Or to her cinema 'godfather', renowned cinephile Pierre Rissient, who was there to see her collect the prize. Pierre Rissient is a Frenchman who discovered Campion's short films at the start of her career in Australia and had them shown in Cannes. She barely knew of the festival at the time, but Rissient insisted she attend."He's supported me, he's been very loyal, he's helped me get finance," she said in an interview."Now he's a very old guy, a beautiful man, and to have a godfather like that in this industry is very helpful and very moving."

Last Thursday, after a 'Conversation with Jane Campion' at the Théâtre Croisette she was given the prize itself at the ceremony that opened the Directors Fortnight. Femmes du Cinema de la Television et des Nouveaux Media (Paris) were there and later posted a segment of the conversation about women directors.



Also at Cannes, this discussion about Top of The Lake, from Allocine.

Many congratulations to you, Jane Campion! Do we celebrate you enough in Australia and New Zealand? I'm not sure that we do.

CampbellX and her 'Stud LIfe' feature

I was very excited when I saw CampbellX’s Stud Life in New Zealand’s Out Takes Film Festival programme. I’ve been longing to see it. And wanted to see it for the first time on a big screen because when I’ve seen some of Campbell’s earlier work online it’s seemed very cinematic. Too cinematic for my laptop.

An actor, cinematographer, curator and writer, Campbell's directed BD Women (1994), Viva Tabatha (1995), Ragga Gyal D'bout! (2006), Legacy (2006), Fem (2007), Paradise Lost (2007) and Broken Chain (a collaboration with writer Mark Norfolk 2008). She also collaborates with other directors, including Cheryl Dunye and Lisa Gornick.

CampbellX

For me, Campbell is also a visionary. Her Radical Film Manifesto has inspired me and her social media practices have provided me with models to follow. And as I write this on Mothers Day, I'm reminded that there are diverse definitions of 'motherhood' and that we need to keep track of our filmmaker matrilineage; Campbell's certainly in that lineage as far as I'm concerned.

Campbell was the first woman filmmaker I knew of who crowd-funded for a feature and who built a strong community around that. The tagline for her Blackman Vision site is the breathtaking ‘when the lioness can tell her story, the hunter no longer controls the tale’. I love Isis Asare's Sistah Cinema interview with Campbell and two actors from Stud Life, T'Nia Miller and Robyn Kerr. It's embedded below – comprehensive, beautiful, illuminating and inspiring. I strongly recommend it as the go-to watch, especially if you're a filmmaker yourself. But here’s a little Q & A as well.

Q: You’re a writer of fiction and non-fiction, a curator, and have made non-fiction short films. What drew you to long-form work and to fiction? Why a feature film rather than a novel or a webseries?

Nathalie Boltt, Clare Burgess & 'The Silk'

I love it when New Zealand women make short films outside ‘the system’ and find success. The Silk is one of these successes. It's Nathalie Boltt's adaptation of a Joy Cowley story, co-produced and co-directed with Clare Burgess. The Silk's been accepted at eleven festivals* where it's won seven awards: five Best Narrative Short Film awards, a Best Acting Award and a Best Cinematography Award. I also have an ongoing interest in actors as writers and directors because it seems to me that they often move behind the camera with real ease; and Nathalie’s a hugely experienced actor as well as a writer/director, so that's another reason to interview her.

Nathalie Boltt

Q: What drew you to The Silk and inspired you to adapt it for the screen? Is it your first script? Were there any particular challenges?

Under-Representation in Scriptwriting (again)

Recently I participated (from my bed, distracted by itchy shingles) in an excellent Blackboard forum discussion on under-representation in scriptwriting, inspired by the news that the prestigious Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting are tracking gender among its applicants. (They have a wonderful ongoing commentary on their Facebook page.) Alas, so far, only a quarter of the applicants are women. According to the Fellowships' Facebook page, for years, the male-female split hovered near 70-30. Recently, however, it has dropped towards 75-25 and they are not sure why that has happened (so they must have been tracking gender for a while, but I think this may be the first year the figures have been public). You have three days left to enter!!!

from Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting Facebook page  (26 April 2013)

Helen Mirren Goes For It (& Women Directors in NZ)

Helen Mirren's making a habit of it. When she accepted a lifetime achievement award last year at the Czech Karlovy Vary Festival she said "I don’t know how many female directors are presenting their films in this festival. I very much doubt that it’s 50%" and added that, should she return to Karlovy Vary in five years, she’d want to see at least 50% of the films at the festival being presented by women directors. Now she's done it again, at Britain's Empire Awards, after fellow award-winner Sam Mendes acknowledged a group of directors who'd influenced him, all men. Like other veteran actors – Judi Dench, Meryl Streep – she's uniquely placed to identify changes in the industry and like Meryl Streep, she's happy to speak out.

The last little while I've been working on one piece about women directors in New Zealand, for the Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand and another for Women Screenwriters: An International Guide, edited by Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo. Academic writing for the page has become more of a challenge than it was, and it makes me miss writing scripts, filming, producing and the immediacy of activism and the associated online communities that I love.

So, this morning, with thanks to Helen Mirren, a round up of what's going well for New Zealand women directors. But first, a gender analysis of the New Zealand Film Commission's (NZFC) funding decisions for the last quarter, available on its website.

Taking 'Throat Of These Hours' to the States

Struan Ashby & Jessica Charlton prepare to film composer Chris White

This is what I've been up to, from my Throat of These Hours blog. Back to Wellywood Woman very soon, am missing it!

1. Preparation

I want to take my play Throat of These Hours to the United States, take my response to Muriel 'back home' to her place, even though her work belongs to all the world. So the Muriel Rukeyser Centenary Symposium was a great place to start and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to give a Skype presentation. And I wanted to show the work-in-progress, not just to talk about it. A filmed reading and performance of Chris White's songs was the only way.

Two weeks before this morning's presentation at the symposium, I finished the second draft of the Throat of These Hours and – with my beloved writing buddy – chose three related extracts to film. Found the cast and crew, all people I love working with or wanted to work with. Made a date to film seventeen pages of dialogue in three continuous chunks; and two associated songs. Max Schleser organised a perfect space for us at Massey University – a mixing suite that looks a bit like a radio station – and some equipment. Suggested three students to work with us.

Friday a week ago Chris White emailed through her settings for two Rukeyser poems. I listened to them and wept. So beautiful.

Then, last Tuesday, we spent the morning filming Chris performing her compositions. And the afternoon filming three related scenes. An intense adjustment, moving from solitary writer to producer (location, equipment, payment, food) and then to directing. And I didn't get some of it right, as when as director I forgot to give the conventional cues – not quite the same as the 'Everyone ready? Yep? Action--' from last year's 48 Hours competition;  I even (blush) forgot to say 'cut' now and then.

But worst of all, I repeated a mistake I made three years ago, with Development-the-movie. The longest sustained shoots I've been part of were for a fast-turnaround children's television series, where the rule of thumb was that a page of script equalled a minute on screen. And that became heavily embedded in my consciousness, with serious consequences for Development. How did I not remember? John Conly, who did a wonderful job on set with the sound, took the footage away to assemble on his own. Then brought it to me on Thursday for the hour he had available. The assembly was thirty-seven minutes long, for a presentation to last an hour, and include an intro and a Q & A. As John said, we'd shot almost half a feature in a single day. No wonder we were tired, though we started at 8.30 and finished at 4.30. Please, let me remember for ever-and-always that my writing takes two minutes per page on screen.

John and I had just one full play-through of his first edit. Script in hand, I concentrated on the text, because this was a filmed reading, not a film. I saw bits of the edited footage when we paused to fix dialogue and I looked up from the script. And felt again delighted by the performances, beautifully lit and shot by Director of Photography Jessica Charlton, with Struan Ashby and student Danesh Pillay on second camera. And now edited.

John-the-miracle worker took it all away for twenty-four hours and fitted the final version around his other work. Then we met Danesh at Massey on yesterday (Friday) morning and upload to Vimeo. Whew. Done.  (Once again, I'm overwhelmed with the professionalism and generosity of a cast and crew, that beautiful alchemy that happens when highly skilled autonomous individuals give their all to a group project, regardless of the small amount they're paid. So much imagination, skill and problem-solving of a high order. Here we are in a drought, at the end of a long hot summer. It will affect the country's economy. Has anyone considered what a rich resource our artists are in this time of crisis?)

Back home to cut back on the oral intro, to allow for the longer clip.  Done and emailed off as backup if someone in Michigan has to read it for me. A quick Skype test with De Ce Rouseau at Eastern Michigan University. It works. Whew again. An experiment with Chris on Skype at her place and me at mine: 'Take the painting off the wall in the background,' she suggested, 'it looks like a huge whiteboard.'

A large dinner of omega-filled fish. Some lovely luck-wishing emails and calls. Help with getting the painting off the wall. Early night. Up at 5 a.m. to sweep the newly exposed cobwebs off the wall behind the painting and to sort out the necessary lights because it's now still dark at 7 a.m. To decide on clothes: 'Depending on your background wear what you are comfortable in - you know me simplicity all the way. I'd have my pj bottoms on and a teeshirt haha'  emailed my writing buddy. Wore the closest I have to a Patti Smith gig jacket, decorated with gifts from dear friends. Chris arrives right on schedule. Together, we lean into the laptop.

And then the presentation. Amazing to see people I'd only read about. Some technical hiccups. Some fabulous comments and questions that will inform my next draft, with more perhaps to come by email. And lovely to hear Chris' responses to questions about her process; she's going to write about it soon. Tiny regrets that we're so far away and missing out on the other symposium conversations, alongside intense pleasure that we made it across the world. Now, here's the original unedited intro.

Note: Our permissions to use Muriel Rukesyer's poems for this presentation do not extend to being able to share the filmed extracts and songs online.

Read more >>

Singing Muriel

This is where I've been. Getting ready for a Skype presentation of my play Throat of These Hours (a work-in-progress) to the Muriel Rukeyser Centenary Symposium at the Eastern Michigan University. Scary stuff. Have never filmed actors reading scenes from a play before (doing that tomorrow with some lovely help). Or given an intro and taken part in a Q & A by Skype (Saturday). Back here soonish. Answering your email soonish, too!

Women Directors at Cannes & Maïwenn's Polisse

The other day, I saw Maïwenn's Polisse at last and marvelled at her skill in writing and directing an absorbing multi-protagonist narrative, as well as acting in it. Polisse won the Prix de Jury at Cannes in 2011, a fine achievement from within the French industry, where women directors are as challenged as they are elsewhere in the world. And now it's time to start thinking about women at Cannes (15-26 May) again. This year, Jane Campion will head the Cinéfondation and Short Film Jury (the first woman to do so?) Steven Spielberg is the Jury's president. How many women have entered their short films and features? Who's advocating for their inclusion?

In the meantime, to continue my series on women directors at Cannes from last year (listed below with a couple of other posts from earlier years) here's a clip about Maïwenn's experience of Cannes and her big win. Made me smile!

Cannes 2010
You CANNES Not Be Serious!

Cannes 2011
Yes We CANNES Do It!

Cannes 2012
Director Destri Martino pre-Cannes
Destri Martino after Cannes, podcast
Director Zia Mandviwalla at Cannes
Cannes and the high stakes involved

Polisse trailer

Laura Thies – an inspiring German woman director

Josephine and Laura about to be unmasked

Many countries have their own crowd-funding sites now. But it seems that there's not a lot of cross-border traffic, except into and out of the States. Because I think that cross-border co-productions may be one path to more features by and about women, I want to learn more about women's features around the world. One way to learn is by following crowd-funding campaigns. So I was delighted to see this German clip from Laura Thies, made for Woods of Words, the second feature she'll direct. It enchanted me.



Laura, her writer Josephine Ehlert and their team are about to start a new crowd-funding campaign, so I asked Laura a few questions about the project and its context. Her energetic response includes a stunning term I hadn't heard before and can imagine using a lot : 'doom-loop'!

Zero Dark Thirty: The Director as Backing Singer?

A Wellington Sevens costume. Thanks, Stuff!

I didn't much want to go to Zero Dark Thirty. I scare easily at the movies and don't often watch war films or action films. I love thrillers though, and I'm waiting for a new thriller about the war against violence against women, an ongoing event in real time – on 14 February Eve Ensler's One Billion Rising is a turning point in that story.

But I'd followed some of the controversy about Zero Dark Thirty, read reports of what Kathryn Bigelow says about her film and watched her speak on various clips. And I'm very interested in issues around work that's hybrid, a mix of documentary and fiction (in New Zealand, Alyx Duncan's recent The Red House and two projects that are on their way, Leanne Pooley's Beyond the Edge about Sir Edmund Hillary's ascent of Everest in 1953 and Gaylene Preston's Hope and Wire series about the Christchurch earthquakes.) So when a beloved friend was willing to go to Zero Dark Thirty, someone I knew would hold my hand if I needed that, off I went.

I didn't need my hand held. The film didn't engage me enough on a visceral level. It's very 'talky' and uses the talk  and 'chapter headings' to move the story along, so I kept missing bits and became confused (as did my mate). There was no point at which I cared about the central character, played by Jessica Chastain. If a man had directed Zero Dark Thirty, I'd have shrugged, enjoyed the rest of the evening on Wellington's wild streets (it was a Rugby Sevens night and a lot of fun for an observer) and not given it another thought.

But because Kathryn Bigelow directed Zero Dark Thirty, I thought at length. Tweeted my interest in discussions and got a couple of responses. And kept thinking. I've come to two conclusions. One is that the film can be read as an art historically influenced statement about women and wars between religions and nation states. The other is that Kathryn Bigelow's statement is compromised by her role as Mark Boal's backing singer.

They might have completely forgotten us

Anna Keir Self Image (1981 silk screen on cotton 58x43.5) 

I. How women artists disappear from history

As Sarah Polley said the other day, “It’s really lonely being a female filmmaker, there really aren’t that many women doing this job.” If we can't connect to our women filmmaker histories, it's even lonelier. Women's histories disappear so quickly. We – and our intellectual and artistic achievements – get forgotten. Often because of lack of resources.

The Bitch Pack & The Bitch List

Today's The Day! The Bitch Pack, ‘changing women's representation on screen – starting with the written page’, has just announced the results of its first annual Bitch List (scripts with Brilliant, Intriguing, Creative, Tenacious Heroines). It's a tally of industry votes for scripts seen (but not yet produced) in 2012 that pass The Bechdel Test  Each script must have:

1. At least two [named] women in it

2. Who talk to each other

3. About something besides a man.

It's a fine occasion and complements the Bitch Pack’s award at Shriekfest, for a horror screenplay that passes the Bechdel Test. 

The Bitch Pack is not alone in its activism. The Writers Guild of America West (WGAW) diversity reports first exposed me to activism within that huge film industry based on the United States' west coast. Every two years, the reports examine trends in film and television employment and earnings and they continue to find that white men are given many more opportunities than women and minority writers. The WGAW has also established programmes that it hopes will effect change. Then I learned about the California-based long-haul work of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media, Miss Representation and various academic researchers. But in the last year, the momentum has quickened. More women in the industry have established initiatives to advance the interests of their colleagues. And I'm excited about them all.

Sundancing

Jane Campion's Top of The Lake

This week I read Ava DuVernay’s script for Middle of Nowhere, the feature for which she won Best Director in the US Competition at the Sundance Film Festival last year. Middle of Nowhere hasn’t reached New Zealand yet, but the elegant, powerful script touched my heart. It has an intriguing woman protagonist, a diverse group of women characters and can be read – like Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers – as an extended metaphor for significant elements in women’s filmmaking.

It’s great to see Middle of Nowhere mentioned often as a contender for various categories at the Oscars. And now that Sundance has announced its 2013 US Dramatic Competition selection, and women directed eight of the sixteen films chosen – the highest ratio ever – it’s possible to imagine that next year they too will do well in awards.

The Sundance announcement hit the headlines and delighted many women. Change at last. But the reality is that the change is limited to the US Dramatic Competition. The women-directed percentages in the other Sundance narrative feature programs are very similar to the 18% in Martha Lauzen’s research into features screened at festivals in the United States between 2011 and 2012. (The proportion of women-directed documentary features is consistently higher than for narrative features, at Sundance and elsewhere.) Here are the Sundance figures:

Kathleen Gallagher – Poet, Playwright, Filmmaker

Kathleen Gallagher & Mike Single on camera, filming the Hurunui River – one of the four principal rivers in North Canterbury – for Water Whisperers/ Tangaroa 

Two things affected me last month. First, the proposal to increase irrigation in Canterbury, a New Zealand region with many major rivers which are depleted and degraded, probably best known outside New Zealand as the site of major earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. Second, Sandy-the-Frankenstorm that devastated Haiti – where there was also a major earthquake in 2010 – Jamaica and Cuba before it hit the United States. I felt deep sadness first, then a desire to help, so offered support where I could. And I thought it might also help to protest about the Canterbury irrigation, and about climate change, but wasn’t sure what was best to do. So I focused on what I had to do: an essay about New Zealand women directors, the garden.

The next draft of Throat of These Hours, my play about poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980, ‘beautiful Muriel, mother of everyone’ according to fellow poet Anne Sexton ) and two women in a Wellington radio station, was waaay at the back of my mind – it’s ten days or so until I start up again with my writing buddy. But then I received an interview with Muriel that I’d wanted for ages. In the interview, from the New York Quarterly, she says

…a lot of things have killed and mutilated people I love. I will protest all my life. I am willing to. But I’m a person who makes, much more than a person who protests…and I have decided that wherever I protest from now on…I will make something – I will make poems, plant, feed children, build, but not ever protest without making something. I think the whole thing must be made again.

So I began to think about the relationship between protest and making, how they make a whole. And that took me back to Muriel’s book The Life of Poetry, where she writes about the fear of poetry, and its capacity to provide a place where all kinds of imagination can meet and change us, change the world. She saw her long prose works as footnotes to her poetry. And she was a film editor, too, who found that working with film was ‘a terribly good exercise for poetry although many [poets] have been seduced away to writing for film’. She also wrote that –

The work that a poem does is a transfer of human energy, and I think human energy may be defined as consciousness, the capacity to make change in existing conditions.

I began to understand the links between poetry and other ‘making’ and protest; and to think about people who work to make ‘the whole thing’ again, and for whom writing poems is part of that process. And came back to Canterbury poet and playwright Kathleen Gallagher, who makes films, most recently a trilogy – Earth Whisperers Papatuanuku, Water Whisperers Tangaroa, and Sky Whisperers Ranginui, and before that Healing Journeys He Oranga He Oranga about eleven cancer survivors and Tau Te Mauri Breath of Peace about how Aotearoa New Zealand became nuclear free and antiwar.

Kathleen Gallagher

Women directors. Globally.

After I completed my survey of New Zealand feature directors by gender, I wanted to put the New Zealand statistics alongside those from other countries. It's impossible to do this globally. The figures are unavailable for Lebanon, for instance. Lebanon has about the same population as New Zealand, but a very different cinema history and no state funding. And it's impossible to make exact comparisons between countries; the available figures often measure something different or differently.  In the United States, the volume of filmmaking of all kinds makes it impossible to establish a comprehensive picture. But here's some information which gives a general idea, for directors of narrative feature films only (Nicola Depuis' thesis on Irish women screenwriters offers related research on women in that country's industry).

Australia (five years to mid 2011) 18%

(theatrically released features only, probably most state-funded) via Screen Australia
Canada (2010) 16% (all state-funded) via Women in View
France (2010) 21% (state-funded, but with lower budgets than men-directed films) my research
New Zealand (2010) 16% (same percentage in both state-funded and not state-funded lists) my research
Norway (2010) 19% (from the Norwegian Film Institute database, not known if all state-funded)
Sweden (2010) 11% (19% of all state-funded films) via Swedish Film Institute
United States (2011-12) 18% (films from round the world shown at selected United States festivals) via Martha Lauzen at the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film
United States (2010) 7% (250 top-grossing films, a steady decrease from 9% in 1998; 5% in 2011) via Martha Lauzen at the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film. I better understood this especially low percentage and the decrease when I saw this graphic.

For the first time, I feel confident that although there are some local differences the percentage of women directors of narrative features is about the same everywhere in the world. Consider these figures in association with the percentage of films with women as protagonists (thank you, Miss Representation!), 16 percent, and it's obvious the problem is serious as well as complex.

But there's hope! By chance I received an email that shows that women who make decisions within the entertainment industry are not only aware of the problem but trying to analyse it and seek solutions. The notes helped me think and I hope they're helpful for you, too.

I don’t know where these women met, two middle-aged women, two Queen Bees. They live on different continents and they work in different sectors of the entertainment industry. Each is a major decision maker with a biiiiig budget. Was it an airport lounge? A conference? A film festival? An awards ceremony? A party? Anyway they were talking and the conversation turned to women directors. And one of them took notes which, much later, she sent to me. (I get many more emails from people I don’t know than I get comments here, even though there’s an ‘Anonymous’ option.) My understanding from the brief email  – this is a very busy woman – is that both participants in the conversation have a strong commitment to women who write and direct feature films. But I have no idea whether they want 'the loud trembling unspoken story of women can break through' or simply to ensure that more women are employed in the industry. The good news, however, is that these two appear not to be like those to whom Jodie Foster referred last year, when it was mentioned that many studio executives do, in fact, look like her — a 48-year-old white female veteran of the industry:

...the lists that come out of the female studio executives: guy, guy, guy, guy. Their job is to be as risk-averse as possible. They see female directors as a risk.

After I read the notes I asked to publish them without attribution. Here they are, with warm thanks to the women concerned, in three parts, slightly edited for clarity (I hope).


1. Women's commitment
Do women directors really want to make movies? Some women take time out for childrearing and then won’t make the commitment required.

2. Women often have specific needs – more intensive support, to be enabled, to have their confidence built
Each one requires a bespoke pathway and mentoring.  There’s a need to ‘curate individuals’.

3. At the moment the pathways don’t always work. [These are pathways established within 'the industry' presumably, because that's where these women are located, far away from processes like crowdfunding.]  What kinds of structures and pathways might work, eg short films to one-hour films?

I've thought a lot about these notes over the last few weeks, as I consider the motivations of the writer characters in my Muriel Rukeyser play, Throat of These Hours. My thoughts are below the jump if you want to read them. But I hope that when you look at the stats and read these Queen Bee notes, you'll have your own thoughts. And I'd love to hear what they are!

Amy Seimetz & Sun Don't Shine

Amy Seimetz

This weekend, there's a group of five films being shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A woman directed one, Amy Seimetz's Sun Don't Shine. The five films are nominated in the Best Film Not Playing a Theater Near You category at the Gotham Awards and were selected by the editors of Filmmaker magazine. None of the films have theatrical distribution and the winner will receive a one-week theatrical run next year. I looked at the trailer for Sun Don't Shine, and then tracked down a rich Anne Thompson two-part interview with Amy Seimetz. There's so much in these clips – a discussion of Amy Seimetz's move from acting (including Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture and Megan Griffiths' The Off Hours) to directing, of how she raised her funding, of why she doesn't engage with social media. (Incredibly, Sun Don't Shine hasn't even got a Facebook page or website I can find – has that affected its distribution chances?) Here's the Indiewire assessment of Sun Don't Shine.

Amy Seimetz's directorial debut is a vivid, suspenseful noir set against a sweltering backdrop of a barebones Florida crime saga. "Two-Lane Blacktop" by way of "Bonnie and Clyde," Seimetz's pulpy tale follows lovers Crystal and Leo (perennial character actress Kate Lyn Sheil and microbudget filmmaker Kentucker Audley) on the lam for mysterious reasons only vaguely made clear near the end of the first act, but even then much of the drama remains deeply ambiguous. Sheil's performance, all scowls and muffled shrieks, provides the ideal counterpoint to Audley's muted delivery. From the shock of its opening shot to the tension of its closing moments, "Sun Don't Shine" conveys mood so eloquently that it's easy to get lost in the proceedings without realizing that so little has happened. It's one of the most impressive debut features to come along in years. Criticwire grade: A-

 I'm really glad to learn about this writer/director and the way she works! An original? Yep! I think so.

Gaming Behavior, Gender & Screen Entertainment

Anita Sarkeesian is best known for her Feminist Frequency video series and blog that explore gender representations, myths and messages in film and other media. If you’ve seen a clip about the Bechdel Test in film (to pass the Bechdel Test a film needs to have two women having a conversation with each other about something other than men), it was probably Anita’s. This year, Anita set up a Kickstarter campaign to fund her video game research. She attracted intense harassment as a result, as well as intense support and many more donations than she expected. That process exposed the anti-woman culture in gaming.

Canada’s Global News has interviewed Anita about her experience and the wider epidemic of harassment women face in gaming spaces, with Grace from the website Fat, Ugly or Slutty which offers a space for people to share offensive online messages and laugh about them, Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch, founder of game studio Silicone Sisters Interactive and James Portnow from the gaming web show Extra Credits.

As I watched this excellent program, I kept thinking that gaming harassment and bullying amplify common but less ‘blatant’ patterns of behavior towards women and towards images of women in other contexts, including the film and television industries. It’s not hard to imagine that similar but more subtly expressed behaviors underlie investor resistance to providing resources for women to tell our stories on screen and affect the content of other screen-based entertainment. The courage, clarity and good humor of the programme participants seem inspirational for anyone who works imaginatively towards better representation of women and by women.

A New Zealand Problem, Or Two

Loren Taylor in Existence

This week, to write what I've agreed to write, I’ve had to come back to New Zealand gender statistics, after eighteen months of learning from countries’ figures, most of them supplied by others – France, Sweden, the United States (including films by women from around the world shown at festivals there), Australia and Canada. New Zealand has a much smaller population than any of these countries and I’ve been able to identify most of the features that have reached production, perhaps almost all. Most on the list have been released in cinemas or shown on television but some have been offered taxpayer production funding and are somewhere in the process between early pre-production and post-production. The list excludes feature documentaries but includes a group of hybrid works – Home By Christmas, Rain of the Children, Love Story, The Red House, Beyond the Edge, Giselle. I haven’t included films that New Zealand writers and directors filmed overseas and New Zealand taxpayers didn't fund at all, like Niki Caro’s North Country, Christine Jeff’s Sunshine Cleaning and Miro Bilbrough’s Being Venice. And there are some New Zealand women directors who aren’t represented on this list  – Jane Campion who recently came home to make a teleseries Top of the Lake and Alison Maclean who will return to Christchurch to shoot her adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal, which she’s writing with Emily Perkins. And Christine Jeffs, about to direct Wonderful Tonight, a romantic comedy with Amanda Seyfried and Patrick Dempsey.

This list shows that we have a gender problem (or two). A related post, inspired by an unexpected email, will come soon and consider  a couple of possible new solutions.

Question Time: Women & Screenplays

Nicholl Fellow (2012) Nikole Beckwith onstage at a talkback

This week, I'm writing for someone else, about New Zealand women directors. It's a challenge to write 'academically' again and to ensure I'm up to date. Constantly, I find myself asking about details and I've returned to the statistics I developed a few years ago. If there are few women's features made, where in the process are women writers and directors choosing not to participate? What factors in the process hinder or support their participation? And what individuals or organisations are best placed to provide information about the essential details?  I've grown used to the New Zealand Film Commission's (NZFC) lack of gender statistics (in contrast to state funders in Sweden, Australia and, Canada). But The Black List and the New Zealand Writers Guild (NZWG) provide the latest examples of organisations who could help with some details but at the moment do not. The Black List is a commercial enterprise so it has no obligations except to its shareholders. But the NZWG is partially funded by the taxpayer and I think that, like the NZFC, it has a human rights obligation to engage with issues around gender and screenwriting. It's tiny compared to the Writers Guild of America West, which has an discrete Diversity Department  and puts out a Hollywood Writers Report every two years, but it could do more.

Celebrating Activism – Yay!

This year, with half the feature films funded by the New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC) directed by women, it's arguable that discrimination against women directors is in remission here. Though probably not far away. A bit like a herpes virus. Lurking forever within the body, grasping at opportunities to act. Globally, the good gender statistics now available from places like Australia, Sweden and the United States, show that for various reasons including discrimination, women direct far fewer feature films than men.  But the number of women directors of feature films is increasing, slowly. And more quickly in some places. Like the diverse Arab world and its diaspora. Two obvious examples are Nadine Labaki (Caramel, Where Do We Go Now?) and Saudi Arabian Haifaa Al Mansour whose Wadjda attracted a lot of attention at the Venice Film Festival, the first feature written and directed by a Saudi Arabian woman. But there are so many more. Just the other day, Ana Lily Amirpour posted about her A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: "BIG BIG VERY BIG NEWS– A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is officially partnering with The Woodshed Horror Company! The production company of Elijah Wood, Daniel Noah and Josh C. Waller! Somebody pinch us!" This is how Variety explains the project, which had a marvellous Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that even Margaret Atwood supported.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is an Iranian Western about vampires that will mark the feature debut of writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour. The film is described as a love story set in a fictitious Iranian ghost town reeking of death and loneliness, where a strange and jaded population is haunted by a lonesome vampire who preys upon the city's most depraved denizens. The mash-up of genre and culture will include a modern soundtrack of '60s-inspired Western guitar music and Iranian pop."When I first heard about Ana's project, a vampire Western noir, shot in black & white, in Farsi, and utilizing an entirely Iranian soundtrack, I was extremely excited. I then saw her proof-of-concept short and was convinced that this was a film that we'd be proud to be a part of bringing to life," Wood said.  

I can't wait for this film!

When I started work on my PhD, more than six years ago, women directors in New Zealand did not speak publicly about their experience of discrimination, nor about the work choices they had made and were making. And that inspired me to develop New Zealand statistics about the NZFC's development process, which showed where women directors were applying for funds for feature development and production (or not) and where they were being successful (or not). And I learned that it was useful to provide hard data because it helps to identify problems and to stimulate open discussion. But the problems are complex. And finding solutions is very difficult. And that's why the latest post in Women Directors – Navigating the Hollywood Boys' Club is so terrific. "Women Directors Fighting for Parity" is a careful analysis of why the Directors Guild of America's diversity programmes fail, written by Maria Giese, herself a member of the DGA. And she suggests some very useful strategies to resolve aspects of the problems that cause the statistics. My response when I read the article was delight. And I thought about other organisations that support diversity, like the Writers Guild and Women in Film & Television. Perhaps they could benefit from a similar analysis of their programmes, and consider Maria's alternative strategies.

From a distance, it seems that thoughtful, practitioner-based, activism is on the rise on the west coast of the United States and that the various organisations and individuals involved are beginning to link up. It's not a surprise to see that Maria's working with Heidi Honeycutt, from Viscera, another strong activist organisation.  As I mentioned the other day, Bitch Pack's The Bitch List, and the Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative are planning to work together. Women Directors – Navigating the Hollywood Boys' Club has connected up with Destri Martino's list of women directors. There's the Anonymous Production Assistant's blog, too, with the Anonymous Production Assistant being a Bitch Pack Advisory Board member. Collectively, all these initiatives and their alliances will enrich problem-solving processes and provide a powerful platform. It's very exciting and I salute their courage and imagination.

Catch Up

Muriel Rukeyser

I'm more of a writer than an activist at the moment. Last week I finished the first draft of my play about Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), the poet and activist whose life, poems and other writings inspire me. It's set in a radio station in the present day and the two main characters are a radio host and her technician. Fellow poet Anne Sexton called Muriel Rukeyser 'beautiful Muriel, mother of everyone' and once I'd finished I could see the draft's connections to my long quest for a satisfying literary and artistic matrilineage.

The draft's now with a reader and then there will be more drafts. I have a pile of other work to finish before year's end. And I haven't had time to organise my spring garden. So this post's a catchup of alphabetically-ordered info that I wish I could write full posts on. Kind of like a magazine, to dip into and out of! And for the next little while I'm likely to post less regularly and more about my own work.

Viscera

Viscera is a visionary not-for-profit based in Los Angeles. Founded by Shannon Lark in 2007, its mission is to expand opportunities for female genre filmmakers and artists. Its range of activities is mind-boggling. I think it’s globally unique, and it provides an extraordinary model for other women to follow. There are the festivals: Viscera, which specialises in short horror films by women, Etheria, a fantasy and science fiction festival, and Full Throttle, for action films. And once Viscera selects a film for its own festivals, it works with partner festivals and events that film screened all over the world. It has teamed up with Hannah Forman to provide Women in Horror Recognition Month (every February). Viscera also offers educational programmes and critiques to people who submit films. And recently Viscera announced the Mistresses of Horror Alliance (MOHA), a membership-based service within which Viscera provides merchandise, networking, education, workshops, and an annual filmmaking grant to one MOHA filmmaker. The Viscera website is jam-packed with information, but I was delighted to check a few more details with Shannon.

Niam Itani (2) At Venice, & After

Niam in Venice

Niam Itani was the only woman filmmaker among the finalists in YouTube's Your Film Festival competition, and joined the other finalists at this year's Venice Film Festival, to pitch the idea which could win her $500,000 to make a feature film. When I interviewed her before she went to Venice, she promised to write about her Venice experience, and she has: here you are. Niam didn't win, but she had a great time! And is now busy working on her feature.

What kind of programme did the organisers arrange for you all? From the YouTube clip, it looked busy!
The program was busy before pitching day, I’d say it was well balanced to make sure we don’t get exhausted but still enjoy each other’s company and have our own time. We went on a sightseeing tour of Venice, which was an excellent idea. We also had several group dinners and cocktail receptions. These were great for networking and bonding. Then there was the pitching day, where pitching was our only task, and screening day which also included a reception.

You were nervous about pitching the project you created especially for the competition. How did the pitch go? Who did you pitch to?
The pitch was perfect, thanks to excessive rehearsals with my friend and one of the producing partners on my next feature film who joined me on the trip. We made sure to cover all aspects of the project while pitching (narrative, commercial, marketing, virality, etc…). When I pitched to Scott Free, Google, YouTube, and Michael Fassbender’s production company, they all said it was excellent and barely had any questions. I was happy because this was my best time pitching too!

European Women Directors: Two Records in One Week?

In Europe, it's a roller coaster year for women filmmakers. There were no women-directed features in competition at Cannes earlier in the year, but recently lots of women's films in every programme at Venice. And two announcements last week further illustrate the unpredictability of European responses to women-directed features. The state-funded Swedish Film Institute (SFI) announced its latest feature film funding decisions and four of the seven films have women directors. That's 57%, and maybe a world record? But in the second announcement, of forty-seven feature films recommended for a nomination in the  European Film Awards 2012, women's representation is very low: they directed only four, a tiny 8.5%. According to the awards website, "with 31 countries represented, from A(ustria) to U(nited Kingdom), the list once again illustrates the great diversity in European cinema." Can it do that, with so few women-directed films represented?  Is this minimal selection of women's work some kind of record too?

NZFC Short Films Announcement

Riwia Brown

The New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC) has just announced its 2012 funding decisions for its Fresh Shorts programme, with grants to 16 new short films. Its press release outlines the selection process and includes some panel comments highlighting the strengths of each film selected (in italics after each film). There are five projects with women directors. Warm congratulations to them and the others in their teams! Where I could easily find extra information about the directors whose projects are green lit, I've added it. Very happy to learn more about the others!

Start From Your Own Heart – The Wisdom of Dana Rotberg in 16 Elegant Tweets

Dana Rotberg

I wanted to go to the Christchurch Writers Festival this weekend, where there's an extraordinary line-up. And I wanted to go to the Big Screen Symposium in Auckland, where there's also an extraordinary line-up. But no, spring's here and I'm focused on the garden and other projects.

But imagine my delight when I saw filmmaker Amit Tripuraneni (@unkreative)'s tweets from writer/ director Dana Rotberg's session Getting to the Heart of the Story, at the Big Screen Symposium-- What an unexpected treat-- I can't remember when I've read a tweet stream that captures the essence of a talk so elegantly. And that essence is so beautiful-- Many thanks, Amit - I wanted to retweet all of these but putting them here seemed a better idea. And many thanks, Dana. I don't know either of you, but together you made my morning!

New Zealand Update 2: State Funding

I agreed to write 4000 words about New Zealand women directors, for a book. And I delayed researching the New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC)  statistics, although I needed to know whether it practises gender equity in its investments. And I delayed comparing its investment in women writers and directors with New Zealand On Air's funding of women who write and direct feature-length television drama (there's some crossover). I knew I had to do the stats, to compare them with those I researched for my PhD (2009, link in sidebar), for a report for Women in Film & Television (late 2010), and intermittently for some of these blog posts, like the one where I celebrated gender balance in the NZFC's short film programme. But I'm a bit dysnumeric and counting's a chore, like hanging out the laundry.

Now I've done some of the work. I didn't go in to the NZFC to search its files and analyse the genders of people attached to funding applications, as I used to. I haven't looked at recent short film funding. Instead, I've analysed the information provided in a year's newsletters, from October 2011 to August 2012. The news is good and bad.

Toronto & Women Directors

Margarethe von Trotta

I'm an optimist and I'm easily enthused. Show me good news about women who make movies and I'm there. So when I saw that women directed six of the twenty features in the prestigious Gala Presentations (Galas) at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF, or #TIFF12 on Twitter) I thought "YAY". I was delighted that Sally Potter's Ginger and Rosa, Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt and Susanne Bier's Love is All You Need were selected for the Special Presentations programme. And I was thrilled that Ava DuVernay's Middle of Nowhere, Yuki Tanada's The Cowards Who Looked to the Sky and Aida Bejic's Children of Sarajevo were included in Contemporary World Cinema programme.

In the past–because I don't go to TIFF–I'd have moved on feeling happy.  But after I signed the petitions associated with this year's protests about the Cannes Film Festival, where there were no women-directed films in competition, I decided to complement my protest with other strategies. I designed these to identify and celebrate the women-directed work that major festivals select and to attempt to identify and analyse the complex factors that lead to women directors' inclusion or under-represention. In theory, the more I understand these factors, the more I can help make change. One strategy I'm working on – and hope others are working on too – is to make gender breakdowns of all programmes at key festivals, to identify specific festival programmes that include women's work in good numbers. For instance, at Cannes this year women directed 30% of the short films in competition.

So I set to work on the TIFF programmes to see how women directors fare.

A Golden Age for Women Who Make Movies? (4)

1. I'm a writer. When I get excited my default activity is to write. And I'm a social media girl. So unless something's confidential, I rejoice in my freedom to speak out and to share what I write.

And sometimes that's a mistake.

A Golden Age for Women Who Make Movies (3) will return in due course.

2. In other news, the sun came out this morning. And stayed out. After all that rain, the sun's steamed a powerful scent from our violets.

The second load of washing is drying. The winter-thin bees are busy in the borage.

3. And the best news: I have a buddy writer. It's ace.

It makes it so easy to start. I email her.

Yesterday: "Hard to get up. Am going blind. Have a pimply thing on right leg that looks like melanoma. Yes, I *don't* want to do this. But a quick squiz through FB etc and some breakfast and then GO." And then I went for it. Into a conflict I was scared I couldn't write. Today: "I'm here with the washing out and the window open. One two three open Final Draft". And I tornado through the rest of the sequence.

And she emails me. And does her pages.

4. More happy news: I'm remembering yesterday with pleasure – working on an edit with a mate.

5. Sometimes A Golden Age for Women Who Make Movies is quite short? A single day when many women focus on their projects?

A Golden Age for Women Who Make Movies? #1
A Golden Age for Women Who Make Movies? #2

Niam Itani (1) - Before the Venice Film Festival

Niam Itani

Niam Itani (also Etany) is the only woman director among the ten finalists in YouTube’s short film competition, Your Film Festival, with her Super.Full. I followed her Your Film Festival campaign for votes, admired its focus and intensity and was delighted when she reached the final. I’m always curious when just one woman filmmaker is successful within a group of successful men, so I wondered what factors affected Niam's achievement, asked her for an interview, and was thrilled when she said yes.  And then, like Super.Full., Niam's generous responses to my questions made me think. And touched my heart.