Wellywood Woman

It's summer solstice here and the long summer break has begun. It's been a busy year for women's film activists around the world. And sometimes a hopeful year. So much research and discussion and interconnection. But not yet enough films, though there are occasional exceptions. For instance, last week the Dubai International Film Festival programmers announced that  women directed 40% of the films  they selected for their Arab programme segments.  'Women Directors Can Sue Everyone!' is, I believe, an important piece about the potential for legal action by women directors and about the role of the null hypothesis, from director and activist Maria Giese – more about her below. It seems a good way to end the year, pointing to a possible direction for the year(s) to come, although what 'suing' means may be very different outside the United States legal system.  The DGA is the Directors Guild of America , the guild that represents the interests of film and tel

Germany has a huge and influential film industry, but till very recently there has been very little information available about women's participation in it, as storytellers. The state funders – as in New Zealand – appear not to record gender statistics and certainly do not make them public. The European Women's Audiovisual Network (EWA) is aware of the lack of data in Germany and is working with the relevant authorities to change this situation. But in the meantime, Belinde Ruth Stieve has published a series of articles  in her blog SchspIN, about women's participation in the industry, in German and in English.  Here's an edited version of two of  Belinde's  posts about women behind the camera and about the need for a German version of France's Charte d'Egalité   (links below) . Many thanks to her.  For weeks I've been planning it and now finally it’s done. Here are some statistics on female filmmakers behind the camera in commercially succes

Last year, I wrote a series of posts about a possible golden age for women's filmmaking (links below). I felt optimistic because accessibility to filmmaking has never been easier, because activists are linking up globally and because women are exploring new ways of working together that include a 'quiltmaking' model. This year, there were disappointments.  For instance, the Catching Fire producer, a woman – Nina Jacobson – shoulder-tapped men to write and direct the story adapted from Suzanne Collins' work. And there's Gravity , protagonist Ryan Stone's (Sandra Bullock) film, also written and directed by a man. Why aren't there more blockbuster films with women protagonists that are written and directed by women? As films about women become more common, will films by women also become more common? I hope so, but am not confident. But it's great to see some evidence in the Sundance selections for 2014 that there's a new generation of women storyt