by Carrie Maxwell.

Lesbian filmmaker Katherine Brooks is taking on a new challenge.

Brooks—whose other films include the lesbian love story, Loving Annabelle and the drama/thriller, Waking Madison, as well as stints working on The Osbournes and The Real World—has taken her career in an entirely different direction with Face 2 Face.

The genesis of her new film came when Brooks realized that she wasn’t happy living in Los Angeles so she sold her house and expensive car and moved to New Orleans to reconnect with her roots (she grew up in a small town in the bayou of La. near New Orleans). While living in New Orleans she had major surgery and became bedridden. As she was laying in bed her depression turned into severe depression and she also started running out of money. Brooks knew she would have to go back to LA and get a job in reality TV which she swore she would never do again.

“Here I am recovering from surgery staying with my mother and contacting reality TV producers telling them I needed a job. During that time I ended up trying to kill myself by OD’ing on Demerol,” Brooks explained going on to say “that’s only happened to me two times in my life, the other instance was when I was a teenager just before I left home. … I do believe in a higher power and while I was laying in bed I said. … Help me do something good with my life. Within an instant I got the idea for Face 2 Face.

“I was on my Facebook page and I saw that I have 5,000 friends but I’m completely alone. I’ve been in this bed for two months and no one has come to visit me so I turned on my flip cam and wrote in my status update ‘the first 50 people who say yes, I’m coming to your city to spend the day with you and I’m going to make a movie about it.’ Within ten minutes I had almost 100 people saying yes so I had my 50 and that is how it started.”

Read the rest of this article from Windy City Media Group.

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by Jay Stone.

At the press conference for the animated sequel Kung Fu Panda 2, someone asked Angelina Jolie whether the powerful fighting tigress, for which she supplies the voice, had a bigger role because a woman directed the movie.

It wasn’t that far-fetched a notion, because under first-time director Jennifer Yuh Nelson the comic adventure had a more pronounced theme of family than the first movie. The exchange prompted Dustin Hoffman -who voices an extended cameo of a wise old warrior -to joke that if a man had directed it, he would have had a bigger part. He was kidding and he wasn’t.

Read the rest of this article from Vancouver Sun.

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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 Melissa Silverstein.

This week the Hollywood Reporter released its list of the 100 most powerful women in Hollywood.  While there are women in power all across Hollywood, especially in the executive suites, one place that still is very difficult to penetrate is the directing ranks.

The Hollywood Reporter list confirmed that fact.  Only one woman director– Kathryn Bigelow — made the list and she was at number 53.

Read the rest of this article from Woman and Hollywood.

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This article was written by John Wildman.

“For this week’s column, I was inspired by fellow Film Threat writer Hammad Zaidi’s excellent Going Bionic column as well as a conversation I had with filmmaker Jon Keeyes (SUBURBAN NIGHTMARE, LIVING & DYING) late last week. Zaidi’s column is just the kind of no-hysteria allowed information on filmmaking from every damn angle someone that has actually been through the wars has experienced.

No hype, just reasonable facts and suggestions. I think it’s great. And I had acted on a friend’s suggestion to speak to Keeyes about my pending moviemaking endeavors – maybe to see if business could be done together, but really just to talk to someone that is as nice and generous with his time and insight as he is accomplished behind the camera.

This article was written by Didion.

“So I got into an argument with colleague about the books he’d assigned to his graduate students.  I took the position that having them read only 2 books by women out of a list of 13 was a pretty low number (and that zero books by people of color was likewise a problem) — and argued that as our grad students are fairly evenly divided by sex and increasingly diverse by race we should show them more of the varieties of academic writing.  He got defensive.  He fired back that he’d chosen books, not authors; that he’d chosen them for high quality and subject matter; and that there weren’t enough good books by women on the subjects he wanted to change the syllabus.”

Read the rest of this article from Feminema.

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This article was written by John Farr.

“When Kathryn Bigelow snagged Best Picture and Best Director at last year’s Oscars, I was thrilled primarily because a) I thought the picture (“The Hurt Locker”) richly deserved it; and b) I hated the idea of the visually stunning but narratively challenged “Avatar” — and its prickly, unabashedly egotistical director — winning the big prize.

It was also, of course, high time that a woman won, though in the history of the Oscars there have been precious few instances when female directors even had the chance: over 80+ years of Academy Award history, prior to Bigelow, female directors had received a total of three nominations.”

Read the rest of this article from Huffington Post.

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This article was written by Mary Murphy.

“The statistics are scary.

“In 2007, females were only 2.7% of all the directors and 11.2% of all the writers employed across the 100 top-grossing films,” says Stacy Smith, an associate professor at the USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism.

“Under a quarter (20.5%) of the producers were women,” she adds. “Other research shows that these numbers have not really changed over time since the late 1990s. When it comes to behind-the-scenes employment, the numbers for women in the entertainment industry are grim.”

It was to help combat this disadvantage in the playing field that Women in Film was created nearly four decades ago by Tichi Wilkerson Kassel, then-publisher of The Hollywood Reporter. With 18,000 members worldwide, the nonprofit group — which tonight presents its annual Crystal + Lucy Awards at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Century City — aims to nurture women behind the camera.”

Read the rest of this article from Hollywood Reporter.

This article was written by Kira Cochrane.

“For Vanity Fair’s annual ­Hollywood issue a few years back, photographer Annie Leibovitz created a classic image of a film director at work. Posing beneath a stormy sky, George Clooney stood with his shirt ripped open, trousers tucked rakishly into his boots, arms outstretched – a young Orson Welles meets Michelangelo’s vision of God. His crew were a crowd of female models in flesh-coloured lingerie; not the obvious costume for a camera operator, but there you are. This was the auteur as masculine genius, a warrior amid a sea of passive women.

This has long been the archetype of the film director, but over the last few months a host of women have been making waves: Sam Taylor-Wood with Nowhere Boy, Lone Scherfig with An Education, Andrea Arnold with Fish Tank. Then there are Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion, both trailing Oscar buzz for The Hurt Locker and Bright Star respectively.”

Read the rest of this article from The Guardian.

The Ten Commandments of Filmmaking
How to Work (and Survive) in the
Film and Television Industry
by Peter D. Marshall

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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