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.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 238 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

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.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 238 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

by Vera Miao.

Have you ever heard of the “Bechdel Test”?

Invented by Alison Bechdel in her classic comic series, Dykes to Watch Out For, this ingeniously simple test has only three criteria to apply to any movie: (1) it has to have at least two women in it who (2) talk to each other about (3) something besides a man.

As an actress and filmmaker, I will not tempt depression and existential crisis again by thinking too hard about how many movies stand up to the Bechdel Test. But go ahead. Do it.

In 2006, I took a deep breath and left my full-time career in the non-profit, social justice world to test my theory that acting could be another step in doing my small part to create social change, this time through storytelling. And while I still believe in the beautiful, transformative power of storytelling, Hollywood has taught me a lot of hard realities about who really gets to tell what stories.The Bechdel Test says it much more simply. I shudder to think if any movies would hold up if we factored in people of color or of different sexual orientation in addition to women (or God forbid, all three).

Out of all movies in the U.S. released in 2011, only 5% were directed by women, 4% shot by women, 14% written by women, and 25% produced by women.

Read the rest of this article from Huffington Post.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 238 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

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.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 220 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

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.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 220 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

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.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 220 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

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.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 220 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

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.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 28 pages of my 210 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

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.

—–
Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 28 pages of my 210 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”
—–

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.

—–
Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 28 pages of my 210 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”
—–