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 Khulani Nkabinde.

Women should take part in the male-dominated film industry as a way of empowering themselves, an official at a Bulawayo-based filmmaking project has said.  Noma Muleya, Bhayi’ Skopo Film Project producer and marketing officer, said women have to rise up and challenge their male counterparts by taking part in filmmaking.

“It is high time that women left the kitchen and did more than cooking. We should make a breakthrough in the male-dominated industries,” said Muleya.

Read the rest of this article from NewsDay.

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by Erik Wander.

The Fort Lee Film Commission is sponsoring a symposium next month dedicated to the first female filmmaker in cinema history, Alice Guy Blache, as part of the 2011 Garden State Film Festival (GSFF) in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The symposium, Reel Jersey Girls:  Alice Guy to Today– a Century of Women in Film, is a key event, said Fort Lee Film Commission executive director Tom Meyers, at what he calls “the largest annual film festival in the state of New Jersey.”

Alice Guy Blache, one of the first three filmmakers in France, began directing in the 1890s. In 1912, Blache came to the then motion picture capital of the world, Fort Lee, and built her $100,000 studio, Solax, on Lemoine Ave.  There she produced, wrote and directed hundreds of films, according to Meyers.

Read the rest of this article from Fort Lee Patch.

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by Sify Movies.

Thiruvananthapuram: First Bollywood and now the Malayalam film industry. Women are making inroads in the male-dominated territory of filmmaking, quitting cushy jobs and breaking away from their settled lives to wield the megaphone.

Take 38-year-old Shiny J. Koshy who took a break from Kuwait, where her husband was employed, and took the plunge into filmmaking. Today she is busy working as an assistant director to award-winning filmmaker Jairaj in his latest film ‘The Train’, which stars Malayalam superstar Mammootty.

Read the rest of this article from Sify.

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by Jentri Chancey.

Do you like watching dramatic comedies with unpredictable characters, yet familiar enough you can relate to? Do you enjoy watching (indie) movies that are unique, with unexpected twists and turns to keep you on your toes?

Do you like movies that are, especially in the end, spiritually uplifting and hopeful? Do you like watching movies from your streaming netflix/internet/phone/TV/theater?

Would you like to have the opportunity to be a part of an experimental, multi-medial indie filmmaking explosion before the movie’s actually even made (and put before you in all of these optional ways)?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, chances are you’d vibe with Lost In Sunshine. At least that’s what we hope.

Read the rest of this article from For Love of Indie Filmmaking.

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This article was written by Dorian Jones.

After more than two decades in the dark, the Turkish film industry is now enjoying a renaissance.  Along with that resurgence, there is a growing number of female filmmakers in Turkey.

In the film Zephyr,  a single mother argues with her young daughter about her decision to leave her with grandparents to pursue a career overseas.

Shot in the  mountains of Turkey’s Black Sea, Zephyr deals with dark issues of abandonment and mortality within the family, as well as questions of love and motherhood.  It is Belma Bas’ first feature film.

Read the rest of this article from VOA News.

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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 Cathy Horton.

“Dorothy Arzner, the only woman director during the “Golden Age” of Hollywood’s studio system during the 1920s, 30s and early 40s and the woman director with the largest oeuvre in Hollywood to this day, was born on January 3, 1897 (some sources put the year as 1900) in San Francisco, California to a German-American father and a Scots mother.

Raised in Los Angeles, her parents ran a café in L.A. featuring German cuisine that was frequented by silent film stars including the superstars Charlie Chaplin’ and ‘William S. Hart and director Erich von Stroheim. Working as a waitress at her parents’ restaurant, no one could have foreseen at the time that Arzner would be one of the few woman to break the glass-ceiling of directing, and the only to work during the early Sound era.”

Read the rest of this article from Ask Kathy Blog.

Jenn Page founded Luminave Films with the goal to create great projects for women to star in, produce, direct, and even crew on.  She was determined to make a female friendly production company where women could be given free reign to create whatever their hearts could dream up.

The culmination of wanting to give women a safe, creative environment, the desire to help actors needing reel material, and all the years of working for other people in the industry led to the creation of  Luminave Films.

Please check out Jenn Page and her website, Luminave Films.

If you live in Vancouver, come join me at the WIFF New Media Day on March 4 – a full day of panels, applications, interactive exhibits and networking that will inspire and engage those who want to tell stories in a more interactive space.