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Check out the newly-updated Please Adjust Your Set website at http://www.pleaseadjustyourset.com/
CRAZY 8s: Our TRIPLE DOG DARE to you!
Thank you to all the women who did take us up on our TRIPLE DOG DARE and showed up on December 13th to pitch for Crazy8s. We knew there were more women out there who would rock as directors and writers!
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Here are some startling facts on the demographics of moviegoers as gathered by the MPAA in 2009:
-- A higher percentage of women than men are moviegoers in all categories of frequency. In total, there are 113 million female moviegoers, compared to 104 million male moviegoers
-- Women have higher attendance per capita (4.7 tickets per year) and attendance per moviegoer (6.9 tickets per year) averages than men.
-- Women buy a higher percentage of movie tickets (55%, or 778 million tickets) than they represent of the population (51%), and more than men buy (45%).
Bottom line: Women are more frequent moviegoers than men, yet less than 15 % of women are directing. Why do movies made for and by men dominate the market?
Read the full report here.
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RECENT ARTICLES:
Bigelow's best director award doesn't help women in film -- it may hurt them: In the Vancouver Sun, Rachel Talalay debates the downside of Kathryn Bigelow's win. http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Bigelow+best+director+award+doesn+help+women+film+hurt+them/2919236/story.html
Film Directors Awards and Gender Inequality: Marie-Claude Arnott quotes several WIFTV board members in this article about Canadian women filmmakers ... http://filmtvindustry.suite101.com/article.cfm/film-directors-awards-and-gender-inequality
Women Working in TV: Is It A Young Girl's Game event at BAFTA, where Kate Kinninmont was on the panel, alongside BBC 1 Controller, Jay Hunt, and chairman of the NFTS, Simon Shaps, amongst others. You can now watch the event online at BAFTA's website. Just follow this link. You can also read Broadcast Magazine's response to the event online by clicking here, or Marion Bowman's article on OpenDemocracy.net . To see the shocking results of the employment census conducted by Skillset, which sparked this debate in the first place, click here.
WIFTV will continue to be an active voice in this important debate for the industry so watch this space...
How Oscar Found Ms. Right: MANOHLA DARGIS in The New York Tims talks about how Kathryn Bigelow's two-fisted win at the Academy Awards has helped dismantle stereotypes about what types of films women can and should direct. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/movies/14dargis.html?emc=eta1
Women in the Seats but Not Behind the Camera: Of the almost 600 new movies that will be reviewed in The New York Times by the end of 2009, about 60 were directed by women, or 10 percent. Some are foreign directors, like Claire Denis (“35 Shots of Rum”) and Lucrecia Martel (“The Headless Woman”); others are documentary filmmakers, including Agnès Varda (“The Beaches of Agnès”) and Aviva Kempner (“Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg”). Many received modest releases; I bet you never heard about, much less saw, most of them.
Shallow Pool for Oscar's Actress Contenders: Steven Zeitchik observes in The Hollywood Reporter it's a dismal year for Hollywood's leading ladies. The best roles for women were in offbeat indies that struggled to get made or produced. The upside is that there may be one or more female directors in Oscar contention. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091117/film_nm/us_oscars_actress
Women & film: Washington Post columnist Ann Hornaday reports why there's a lack of Oscar-contending performances by female actors. Studio executives are increasingly chary of making films about strong women. They're perceived as box office poison. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/23/AR2009102300194.html?hpid=topnews
Violence Against Women & Girls Surges on TV: On October 29, 2009 Melissa Silverstein published an article in Women & Hollywood about violence against women and girls on tv. She reports that the organization, Parents Television Council compared the data they took in 2004 with data from 2009 and found that overall violence irrespective of gender increased 2% and violence against women increased 120%. read the full article here
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Our mantra for this year is advocacy,
both internationally and here at home.
both internationally and here at home.
Many people become a member of WIFTV because they want to understand better how to network and connect with their colleagues as they build their careers. But the answer to the questions, “How do I break into film and television?” and “How do I take my career to the next level?” are not simple.
Our Advocacy page is intended to educate and inform female content creators at all stages of their career about the latest research and findings on the “state of the industry.” Check here often for updates from our politically engaged Advocacy Committee.
If you have information to share that will support our advocacy efforts, please email advocacy@womeninfilm.ca .
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Cannes contender Jane Campion gives clarion call to women directors!
Read the exciting news here
April 2009 Advocacy Report – Twenty is the new Fifty
Report by Peggy Thompson
Women are fifty percent of the population (52% actually) but you’d not know it in terms of Canadian taxpayer money spent on women working in Canadian film, particularly feature film and below the line in technical positions on union productions.
Women seem to be hovering on average around 20% participation in key roles in Canadian feature film production including directors, writers, and producers. And the projects they are associated with receive a much lower proportion of funding. The picture for women in television is better, but still not at equity. In the below the line technical sector women are shamefully underrepresented, with less than 1% of women in the Director of Photography role, for example. We’ve yet to do a study on female performers in Canadian tax dollar funded films and we’ll get on that next.
Our studies are showing that whether or not it’s a film festival, development money from pay television or Telefilm, or production financing from all those same sources; women are seriously under-supported. Clearly the problem is lack of talent, KIDDING! And this is happening despite the fact that women’s feature films tend to do better on a budget to box office rate ratio.
This feels very much like how it was when I started out with my first film back in 1986 but at that time, the industry seemed to feel it was a problem that needed to be addressed. Back then, many government agencies funded with taxpayer dollars acknowledged this was an issue. For example, the Western Canadian Telefilm Head John Taylor didn’t like those numbers and supported a good number of feature films directed, written and produced by women. Back then, and until a couple of years ago, Telefilm tracked gender on their production applications for feature film financing. They no longer do so, even though the federal government requires gender equity analysis and planning for equity from all of their other departments. For some reason, the message now seems to be, “Hey, 20% is the new 50%– that’s all the equity you can expect, so just get over it.”
The WIFTV Advocacy Committee has asked for a meeting with the Telefilm Working Group and has received no response. We’ll ask again.
I know I am preaching to the choir, but it is time we all worked from the same script. Share these statistics with your co-workers, your relatives, your representatives. Let them know why you are so passionate about doing this work and why it is no surprise that it is so challenging. Consider what you think should be done about it!
On that rabble-rousing note, I leave you with a few notes from the Quebec
Our colleagues at the Quebec Quebec
Lucette Lupien, the coordinator of RE, has expressed an interest in working with WIFTV on a common advocacy initiative. Specifically, we hope to be able to get more precise analysis (elusive to date) of source of blocks in funding for female directors at Telefilm: are producers presenting fewer films written/directed by women to Telefilm? Are fewer films written/directed by women being selected by Telefilm?
More anon.
Peggy Thompson
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Report from the Advocacy Committee:
Women in View 2010, Canada’s Top Ten and the Telefilm Working Group
Rina Fraticelli, Liz Shorten, Peggy Thompson
January 6th 2009
Last year at this time the stats from the Toronto International Film Festival’s Top Ten were pretty dismal in terms of female representation. Of the 20 films which made the Top Ten list, only one (5%) was directed by a woman and this was a short film. Ironically this year, no woman had a short film selected for this list but…
Of the ten feature films selected for the Top Ten 4 were directed by women (40%). They are Before Tomorrow directed by Marie-Helene Cousineau and Madeline Piujuq Ivalu, Fifty Dead Men Walking, directed by Kari Skogland, Heaven on Earth directed by Deepha Mehta and Maman est chez le coiffeur, directed by Lea Pool.
The Lea Pool film received funding as a result of advocacy action by a group of Montreal
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