Wellywood Woman

So Mockingjay had a big opening.  And here's @licoricehazel's immediate response– That' s all terrific. And as a New Zealander, I'm especially proud and delighted because 'our' Lorde curated the music. And wrote and performed some of it too. But I'm also remembering that men wrote almost all the Hunger Games scripts and directed all of the films. And I'm reflecting on that depressing data on women who make films and about the (mis)representation of women and girls in films. It continues to pour out. A storm. A flood. A tsunami. It's almost overwhelming. In September, the  European Audiovisual Observatory   released  Female Directors in European Films: State of Play and Evolution Between 2003 and 2012   –  the first substantial study to measure the director 'gender divide' at pan-European level. Since then I've been thinking about the various recent reports and their interrelationships, in an attempt to understand wh...

One day last week I got up early, to watch the stream of presentations at the Washington session of the 2d Global Symposium of the Geena Davis Institute of Gender in Media (LA session coming  soon) . It was great to see and hear people I'd only read about and to see the involvement of UN Women . I was especially inspired by activist, filmmaker and philanthropist  Abigail Disney  ( Pray the Devil Back to Hell ,  Women, War & Peace , founder of Peace is Loud  and the outspoken great-niece of Walt.) 'Gatekeepers are wrong 50% of the time', she said, in a fresh version of screenwriter William Goldman's assertion that in the screen industry 'nobody knows anything'.  The other statement that's stayed with me came from Dr Stacy Smith, of the Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative , who led the Geena Davis Institute research launched at the symposium, Gender Bias Without Borders .   'As money moves in, women are pushed out',...

Get Your Hopes Up (Ballance St Wellington) photo: Phantom Billstickers I'm at the bus-stop. Feeling gloomy. Ages ago I agreed to write about New Zealand women screenwriters, for an international guide. And now the deadline's looming and I've lost interest. In the eight years of my Development project , nothing has changed in New Zealand. Creative New Zealand and the New Zealand Film Commission, the organisations that distribute public funds to filmmakers and other artists, have no gender policy. They don't record gender statistics consistently. And they never publish them. Nor does New Zealand On Air, which funds some movies for television, and is required to consider women as an audience. The film guilds – publicly funded – don't make diversity statements or produce diversity reports. And change is slow everywhere. Callie Khouri knows what she's talking about, from a career that stretches from Thelma and Louise to Nashville . She said the other...

lisa gornick where are the women? Market validation, I've learned at Activate , identifies where people feel pain, in order to provide a product that relieves the pain. Help An ‘Activist’ Today: Questions Please (EP 3) explored some questions about niches that aren’t well served, where people might feel pain and go in large numbers to films that were made with them in mind. But women are not a niche; we’re half the population. Within all those niches, are there any common kinds of pain that will be relieved by films about women? And if so, what kinds of films? As I research questions to ask in my survey about films for women, am I faced with an impossible task, just as I was when trying to create questions about films that women write and direct? I hope not. While I know that it’s possible for women to DIWO (Do It With Others), to make and distribute a film with mates, I still dream of finding a sustainable way to do this, where the team gets paid and there are audiences who...