Wellywood Woman

lisa gornick woman and sun Every Wednesday evening I run down the hill to central Wellington, to spend three hours with a small group of people who have amazing ideas that they want to develop for the market. I love being with them, go WOW a lot. Grow Wellington has brought us together on a course it calls  Activate . And it calls us all ‘activists’, which makes me smile. I’m there to develop my ideas about sustainable structures that will support women who write and direct feature films, so they can do their work and get it to their audiences. Especially if they want to make movies with women as central characters. I want women filmmakers to have their place in the sun (thanks for the image, Lisa ). And I want their various audiences to see the films that I believe they are hungry for. Last week, a visitor introduced us to market validation, and I came up against some hard questions. How do I know that there’s a market for movies by women? Who cares if a woman writes and direct

I long for the day when women write and direct 50% of all feature films. And this week, I had a moment or two of optimism and celebration, with many others working towards the same goal, especially all of us who were in some way involved in last year’s You CANNES Not Be Serious campaign .  Why? Because when Thierry Fremaux announced the Cannes Film Festival line-up the other night, we learned that, for the first time, four films with women directors are in competition. The directors are Julia Leigh with Sleeping Beauty, an Australian, and already a successful novelist, Naomi Kawase (Japan, who won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2007 for Mogari no Mori ) with Hanezu No Tsuki , Maiwenn (France) with Polisse , and Lynne Ramsay (England) with We Need To Talk About Kevin . 21%. Warm congratulations to them all, and to the people who work with them. And to Ruth Torjussen ( FilmDirecting4Women ) who initiated You CANNES Not Be Serious , Melissa Silverstein ( Women & Hollywood ) who adopt