Wellywood Woman

From left: Sharon McGowan, Rina Fraticelli of Women in View, Claude Joli-Coeur, Karen Day, Susan Brinton The Canadian National Film Board chairperson and film commissioner, Claude Joli-Coeur, has announced that at least half of the board's productions will now be directed by women, and half of its funding will go toward films directed by women. The plan will be rolled out over the next three years, and the board will remain completely transparent in its budgetary allocations by making all production spending information publicly available online. For the current fiscal year, 43.4 percent of the board’s production spending will go toward projects directed by women, and 43.5 percent will go toward projects directed by men, 11.3 percent of the board’s production spending will go toward projects directed by mixed teams, and 1.8 percent hasn't been allocated yet. Claude Jolie-Coeur made the announcement at a panel at the Vancouver International Women In Film Festival (jus...

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...