by Vanessa Thorpe.

Cannes‘ fabled Croisette promenade was dotted with the customary festival starlets in high heels and glamorous dresses yesterday afternoon.

But just behind them, a feminist uprising of sorts was in full swing. Inside a landmark hotel on the seafront strip in the South of France, loud calls for positive discrimination in favour of women’s films were being voiced. The impact of British director Andrea Arnold’s public anger about the failure to include a female director in the prestigious Palme D’Or line-up continues to stir controversy at the annual celebration of world cinema.

Speakers at a Beyond Borders diversity symposium echoed Arnold’s complaint that while films from around the globe may have made the shortlist for the annual prize, directors drawn from half of the population have been ignored.

Read the rest of this article from The Guardian.

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by Darnell L. Moore.

TFW is excited to highlight the inventive work of several phenomenal women filmmakers in a forum that runs from today through Friday. Carmen Torres, tiona m., Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Anna Barsan, Pratibha Parmar, and Nev Nnaji reflect on the plight of women filmmakers in a male-dominated industry, feminist approaches taken up in filmmaking, filmmaking as both an art form and modality for social change, and their processes.

Read the rest of this article from The Feminist Wire.

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by Linda Barnard.

At the 2010 Oscars, Kathryn Bigelow made history as she accepted the Academy Award for Best Director for her powerful dramatic thriller, The Hurt Locker, the first woman to take the prize.

It was a pivotal moment for women working behind the camera and a signal that the male-dominated industry was welcoming new voices into the elite filmmakers’ club. But the euphoria was short-lived.

“I think Bigelow was caught between a rock and a hard place,” says writer-director Leslie Ann Coles, founder and director of Toronto’s Female Eye Film Festival, which marks its 10th year next month.

“If she acknowledged, ‘Hey, I’m a woman director,’ the feminists said, ‘It’s not about being a woman, why make it an issue?’ At the same time, what she did — thank you.”

Read the rest of this article from The Star.

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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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