by Casey Gillis.

Randolph College’s 2012 Driver Film Festival is focusing on female filmmakers this year.

“Women Behind the Lens,” set for this weekend, will feature talks and screenings with directors Tracey Deer, an up-and-coming Canadian filmmaker, and Robin Honan, who produced the Oscar-winning documentary “Freeheld.”

“The idea [for the festival] is to bring in people who are working in the field in different capacities to … meet with students,” says communications professor Jennifer Gauthier. “To give them a sense of what it’s like to be in the film industry and show lots of different kinds of work.”

Read the rest of this article from The Burg.

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by Sandy Cohen.

The Sundance Institute and Women In Film are working together to track female filmmakers who are showing their work at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and plan to use the data to increase women’s presence in all areas of filmmaking.

The aim of the joint effort, announced Monday, is to “initiate a real hard look at why this constant lack of parity seems to exist in terms of the amount of women working in film and media and the amount of men,” said Cathy Shulman, president of Women in Film. “What does it really mean and why is it happening, and instead of talking about it every year as a fact, start to see if we could be part of a solution.”

Keri Putnam, president of the Sundance Institute, said the organizations were motivated by statistics that show that only 5 percent of the top 250 films last year were directed by women. That figure hasn’t changed since 1998.

Read the rest of this article from Associated Press.

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by T’Cha Dunlevy.

It’s a man’s world – film directing, that is.

So affirms a recent study by Université du Québec à Montréal researchers Anna Lupien and Francine Descarries, undertaken in partnership with Réalisatrices équitables, an association of female filmmakers.

Under the title Still Pioneers – Career Paths of Quebec Feature Film Directors, the study – results of which were announced this week – reveals troubling statistics and insights into the reality of female filmmakers in Quebec.

Despite making up nearly half the student population in university film departments, women direct a disproportionately small number of the features made in our province – just a handful of the 40 films made here last year. It’s been calculated that the number of Quebec films made before the end of 2007 is somewhere between 700 and 900 (a number hard to get an exact fix on because until recently, directors didn’t have to register their films). But only around 100 of those have been directed by women.

Read the rest of this article from Montreal Gazette.

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This article was written by Helen Earnshaw.

“Ok so a female filmmaker has never take home the Best Director Oscar but that doesn’t mean that there are no talent filmmakers at work in Hollywood at the moment.

On the contrary the women are slowly rising and over the last twelve to eighteen months we have seen the ladies produce movies that have done well at the box office.”

Read the rest of this article from Female First.

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