Films By Women – Page 7

The Strange Case of the Hidden Female Director

What links the following films? ‘City of God,’ ‘Turbo Kid,’ ‘Slumdog Millionaire,’ ‘The Act of Killing’ and ‘Moomins on the Riviera.’ They all have women directors in their directorial teams. … Why did many of us think the movies were directed by men? If they received awards recognition, why were the men the only ones awarded?

This guest post written by Bethany Ainsworth-Coles is an edited version of a post that originally appeared at Tonight We Are Dinosaurs. It is cross-posted with permission.

What links the following films?

City of God, Turbo Kid, Slumdog Millionaire, The Act of Killing and Moomins on the Riviera. Got it? They all have women directors in their directorial teams. This leads to some big questions. Why didn’t we know these female directors were on the team? Why did many of us think the movies were directed by men? If they received awards recognition, why were the men the only ones awarded? Can these films be considered for the #52FilmsByWomen challenge? What happened to these women directors and why were they forgotten?

To answer these questions I needed to write more questions.

Of our original list of films, we need to split them into two sections.

Team 1:

Slumdog Millionaire directed by Danny Boyle and co-directed by Loveleen Tandan
The Act of Killing directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, co-directed by Christine Cynn, and co-directed by Anonymous
City of God directed by Fernando Meirelles and co-directed by Kátia Lund
Moomins in the Riviera directed by Xavier Picard and co-directed by Hanna Hemillä.

But then we are left with just Turbo Kid and I wanted the categories to be even. So let’s add a few more titles to Team 2.

Team 2:

Turbo Kid directed by RKSS (François Simard, Anouk Whisell, and Yoann-Karl Whisell). RKSS is the super funky cool name of radical directorial cool cats Road Kill Super Stars.
Little Miss Sunshine directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
Ruby Sparks directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
Nim’s Island directed by Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin

Now with this in place we can start working this out.

So what’s the difference between the films in Team 1 and Team 2?

Co-Directors vs Teams.

Team 1 you may notice uses co-directors instead of directorial teams. Often this is due to eligibility in festivals, competitions, and associations. The Directors Guild of America (DGA) will not allow more than one director to direct a film as they have a one director per film policy. However, there are some notable exceptions for a “bona fide team,” including the Coen’s, Wachowski’s, and Valerie Faris & Jonathan Dayton, who we will get to later. The DGA also makes exceptions for “multi-storied” films and multilingual films. This DGA’s policy led to Robert Rodriguez dropping out of the DGA to make Sin City as they would not make an exception and allow co-directing credits for Frank Miller due to lack of experience.

Notably, the DGA does not recognize co-directors. At all. Sometimes filmmakers get around this by putting the co-director somewhere else in the credits as well and giving them another title, such as a producer. As mentioned earlier, the rule is sometimes let through for teams but not very often.

The Academy Awards also do not recognize co-directors with regards to award nominations.

What does that mean for the co-directors?

Mostly this means that people don’t know about them. Although sometimes, certain awards and competitions do give them recognition, such as the AFI Audience Award and Washington DC Area Film Critics Association who gave recognition to both Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund for City of God. Sadly, these awards and competitions that recognize co-directors are few and far between. Meirelles went on to make The Constant Gardner and Blindness. Lund directed some TV, including the series (fdp) and City of Men (where she once again collaborated with Meirelles). She is only just back to filmmaking; this time with new documentary Miratus.

Okay, so you’ve talked about Lund. Where are the other women co-directors now? Do they have other movies that I can support?

Loveleen Tandan, the co-director of Slumdog Millionaire, was awarded alongside Danny Boyle with the New York Film Critics Online Award for Best Director. Currently on her IMDB page, there are no new credits since Slumdog Millionaire other than a Thanks in short film The Road Home from 2010.

The Act of Killing co-director Christine Cynn collaborated again with Joshua Oppenheimer on The Look of Silence, this time as an additional Camera and she was credited with a Very Special Thanks. Cynn recently directed and co-produced the upcoming documentary Shooting Ourselves.

Hanna Hemillä was credited not just as co-director (and sometimes director) but as a writer and producer of Moomins on the Riviera. She has quite the catalog of work, especially as a producer, and undoubtedly she will continue to make more films.

So can we count Team 1 and Team 2 movies for the #52FilmsByWomen challenge?

I’d argue yes. These films are directed by a woman. There may be a man on the directorial team but I don’t think that should take away from the women directors’ work. I think it’s very important to give them recognition for the work they did, especially as many organizations won’t. So tell people, write about them. Don’t forget the female co-directors and teams and find others that have been forgotten and if you like the movie sing their praises and follow their career!

Recommended reading:
Why Not Quit the Director’s Guild? by Daniel Engber at Slate
What the Hell is a Co-Director Anyway? by Melissa Silverstein at The Huffington Post
And the Winner Isn’t… by Alex Bellos at The Guardian
DGA page 14 Section 1-301. Definition of Employees Recognised

*Thank you to Disqus user Dodo for the inspiration behind this post.

Bethany Ainsworth-Coles is a writer from England who enjoys overanalyzing things and watching movies. She can be found over at her blog Tonight We Are Dinosaurs or on Twitter @wierdbuthatsok.

‘Hooligan Sparrow’ Touches on Topics of Fame and Notoriety in Activism

The documentary, from director Nanfu Wang, follows Chinese activist Ye Haiyan (aka Hooligan Sparrow) as she protests the lack of prosecution in a child sexual abuse case and suffers retaliatory harassment, surveillance, and imprisonment. … ‘Hooligan Sparrow’ is, both intentionally and unintentionally, about the legends that activists build for themselves.

Written by Katherine Murray. | Hooligan Sparrow is screening at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault]

There’s a lot going on in Hooligan Sparrow. The documentary, from director Nanfu Wang, follows Chinese activist Ye Haiyan (aka Hooligan Sparrow) as she protests the lack of prosecution in a child sexual abuse case and suffers retaliatory harassment, surveillance, and imprisonment. The film is full of scenes where strangers who may be plain-clothes police officers threaten to break Wang’s camera, or where the footage shows her running feet, the ground, or the stairs while people shout threatening things in the background. She breathlessly explains to us that she’s had to go into hiding, that she can’t use any form of travel requiring an ID or credit card and that her friends have warned her that the police are asking questions about her.

The issues that Sparrow and her associates (including lawyer Wang Yu, who has been indefinitely detained as of the film’s release), protest are important and well-explained. Sparrow first came to prominence when she began protesting the criminalization of sex work through a stunt where she publically declared that she would prostitute herself for free. In the film, she protests a high-profile sexual abuse case, in which a school principal allegedly abducted several of his female students and forced them to have sex with government officials. After first denying that any sex took place, the defence begins to argue that the girls accepted money in exchange for sex, which would reduce the charge to child prostitution rather than rape, and carry a much lighter sentence. Sparrow and Yu explain that this is a common tactic in Chinese courts – to cover up rape by claiming it was prostitution instead.

Although their cause is just, Sparrow and Wang, who becomes increasingly involved in the action even as she documents it, also carry a certain cloud of ego and drama into their work. It’s the same cloud of ego and drama that follows many full-time activists all over the world, and there have been very few explorations of what it means. It’s entirely possible to both try to make the world a better place and like being the center of attention, but there’s definitely a tension that plays out between those two things.

For example, there’s a scene late in the film where Wang is finally able to interview the father of one of the sexual abuse victims. He reveals that he avoided engaging with them earlier because the only thing he knew about Sparrow was that she’d done a stunt where she said she’d have sex for free. It seems like he doesn’t know or understand what she was trying protest – the protest didn’t draw his attention to the dangers faced by sex workers due to criminalization; it just drew attention to Sparrow. And it actually made him less interested in seeing her as a potential ally, even though they were on the same side.

As Wang narrates the film, after the fact, she also seems to take a certain amount of pleasure in how people were always trying to shut down her film. I don’t doubt at all that she was scared when she was running from violent mobs, or thought she was about to be arrested and detained by the police. But it’s telling that the story, which is supposedly about the persecution that Sparrow is facing, is framed by an incident where someone wrestled Wang’s camera away from her. Definitely scary. Definitely uncool. Kind of throwing the attention on herself rather than either the sexual abuse trial or the activist she’s been profiling.

Hooligan Sparrow is, both intentionally and unintentionally, about the legends that activists build for themselves. It’s about the notoriety that Sparrow receives, the unfair persecution, the harassment, the shunning – being left on the side of the road with her daughter and all their belongings – an incident that later becomes the subject of an art exhibit from Ai Weiwei. But it’s also about why she’s called Hooligan Sparrow. It’s about fame. It’s about glory. It’s about yelling really loud in front of a bunch of other people, and then congratulating yourself and kind of forgetting about it.

It’s not clear from the film whether Sparrow’s protest actually had much impact on the outcome of the trial – it’s not clear whether it made the victims feel supported; it’s not clear whether it changed anyone’s mind. I think it’s important for activists to publicly demonstrate that there are people who don’t agree with what’s going on, even if it doesn’t change anyone’s mind, but the film isn’t focused on whether Sparrow’s work has any impact on anyone else. It also doesn’t delve into the kind of investigative journalism that would uncover what’s happening in China’s rape and sexual assault trials, how systemic government corruption has become, or how the government (allegedly) tries to silence protesters.

On the flip side, the film also doesn’t fully commit to a narrative about Nanfu Wang’s journey as documentarian, even though she becomes a more and more active participant as the story goes on. There’s no strong sense of how this experience changed her, or what the role of gonzo journalism is in helping to bring freedom of speech and expression to China. There’s an interesting subplot in the film, where one of Sparrow’s followers seems to become interested in journalism after meeting Wang and takes up the mantle of “documenting the atrocities” on camera after she’s gone – it’s a subplot I would have like to have seen explored more.

I also wish the film had delved deeper into the subplot about how technology has made it harder for the government to make people disappear. The protesters in Hooligan Sparrow tape messages whenever they fear they’re about to be arrested, explaining that, if they die in custody it will not be because they killed themselves, imploring people to look for them if they go missing, and explaining how their disappearance may be linked to participation in political protests. It’s the same principle that led Ai Weiwei to tweet a photo of himself being arrested, and a form of action that may hold real promise for political change.

Wang’s adrenaline-fueled attempt to get through the summer without losing her camera makes for an engaging story, but it isn’t always clear that what she’s captured on the camera exposes new information or reveals the path to increased human rights in China.

Sparrow’s fellow activist, Wang Yu was arrested along with several other human rights lawyers in 2015 and, as of the film’s release, had been held without trial since. The filmmakers have set up a page with information on Wang Yu’s detention by Chinese authorities as well as suggestions for how to take action. Yu is also one of the women identified in the US government’s #freethe20 campaign.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

‘Ovarian Psycos’ Highlights the Reasons We Still Need to Take Back the Night

The Ovarian Psycos is a cycling club for women of color in East Lost Angeles that’s a lot like Take Back the Night. Its purpose is to build a sense of community between local women, but also to draw attention to the fact that women aren’t safe unless they travel in packs. … [Directed by Kate Trumbull-LaValle and Johanna Sokolowski] the film captures something true and beautiful about the power of grassroots organizing, and the idea that regular people can band together and try to create change.

Written by Katherine Murray. | Ovarian Psycos is screening at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

A few years ago, I went to a Take Back the Night rally and experienced the joy of walking down a street after dark without feeling afraid. I’ve come to understand how that sounds weird to some men, but almost every woman I know, including me, has at least one story about trying to walk from point A to point B after sundown and being harassed by a stranger. Even in cases where the stranger didn’t do anything violent, we had no way of knowing whether or not he would. It’s not a good sign when someone starts chasing you and won’t back off when you tell him to leave you alone. It makes you scared, and it makes you angry. It makes you think, “Why don’t I have the right to walk two blocks in peace, without having to worry that you’re going to rape me or kill me?”

The Ovarian Psycos is a cycling club for women of color in East Lost Angeles that’s a lot like Take Back the Night. Its purpose is to build a sense of community between local women, but also to draw attention to the fact that women aren’t safe unless they travel in packs. The club hosts several different events, but the ones that get the most attention are the ones where women meet to ride through LA streets at night.

A new documentary from Kate Trumbull-LaValle and Johanna Sokolowski follows the club during a transition in leadership, when one of the founders, Xela, abruptly drops out. Although focus is split between three club members, Xela is arguably the principle character, and the filmmakers spend time uncovering her back story and motivations for starting the club. We learn that she experienced violence and abuse growing up, and felt alone with no one to confide in except a mother who rejected her feelings. Xela wants her daughter to feel like she’s part of a community, with other women in her life who she can turn to, so she started to Ovas, but it seems like engaging with violence against women on a regular basis stirs up memories that are, at times, overwhelming.

The other two members profiled in the film are Andi, who steps up as leader after Xela drops out, and Evie, a new recruit whose mother disapproves of her joining a bike club. Each of them struggles separately with how to make their families understand why this is important and how to make a difference in the community.

As events play out, it’s interesting to watch the internal dynamics of the club – the meetings where they make decisions about recruitment strategies and events are extremely democratic and sometimes emotionally charged – and the filmmakers do a good job of capturing the hard-to-articulate truth that we need to support and protect each other, and that being able to move freely through the streets is a right that’s been stolen from us.

Ovarian Psycos is structured so that we learn about the purpose and mission of the club before finding out how people on the street react to it, and it’s a little disappointing to learn that the group gets slammed with hateful, ignorant comments on a regular basis. The filmmakers interview a handful of people outside the club, some of whom are completely okay with a bike club for women of color, but they also find one man who works at a bike shop and manages to whitesplain why their club shouldn’t exist (it’s discrimination and not actually in the tradition of the Chicano movement). This is later challenged by a scene where Xela concisely explains intersectionality and how, as a woman of color, it’s hard to find a place in either white feminist or patriarchal Chicano contexts. And, while I’m bummed out that I wouldn’t be able to join this club, I can’t really argue with her logic about why it needs to exist.

What’s frustrating, as ever, is the realization that some people have been able to live their whole lives without realizing that this is a problem. Either because they’ve always been able to walk from point A to point B, or because they’re used to the idea that men attack women like jackals whenever they find us alone. That isn’t a mindset that’s helping anyone – it reduces men to predatory animals and implies that there’s no way to make gender-based violence stop – but it’s the mindset you find whenever someone says, “Why do you need a bike club for women at all?”

Ovarian Psycos answers the question of why you need a bike club for women, and specifically, in East LA, why you need a bike club for women of color. One of the less-explored, but very interesting aspects of the club is that Xela and some of the other members seem to have a desire to reconnect with pre-colonial indigenous Mexican traditions. I’ll confess my own ignorance and say that it never occurred to me that would be an important part of Latinx identity, but it makes complete sense, and I would happily watch another documentary just about that.

All together, the film captures something true and beautiful about the power of grassroots organizing, and the idea that regular people can band together and try to create change. The frustration of being misunderstood and misrepresented in media is part of the package, but there is a real sense that these women have found something meaningful in this club and formed strong connections. They have the opportunity to be leaders, and it’s an opportunity that they created for themselves out of virtually nothing.

There are still people who’ll say, “How is riding your bike at night supposed to do anything for women’s rights?” but it does a lot if it reminds you what it feels like to be free, and how far we have to go before we get there.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

‘Inside the Chinese Closet’ Highlights the Need for Social Acceptance of LGBTQ People in China and Globally

Often, when we talk about LGBTQ rights, we focus on legal battles – criminalization, marriage equality, adoption, and civil rights – but Sophia Luvara’s new documentary reminds us that social acceptance and cultural attitudes are just as important. ‘Inside the Chinese Closet’ follows Andy and Cherry, a gay man and a lesbian woman who struggle to reconcile their desire to live truthfully with their families’ expectations of them.

Written by Katherine Murray. | Inside the Chinese Closet is screening at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

Editor’s note: We have used LGBTQ to be inclusive but the documentary only addresses the issues facing gay men and lesbian women.

Often, when we talk about LGBTQ rights, we focus on legal battles – criminalization, marriage equality, adoption, and civil rights – but Sophia Luvara’s new documentary reminds us that social acceptance and cultural attitudes are just as important. Inside the Chinese Closet follows Andy and Cherry, a gay man and a lesbian woman who struggle to reconcile their desire to live truthfully with their families’ expectations of them.

Andy spends time trying to arrange a “fake” heterosexual marriage for himself through an LGBTQ dating service designed for that purpose. When asked what he’s looking for in a fake wife, he says that he wants someone who can be a best friend and that, in the long run, they’ll have to have some kind of love between them if they’re going to live together and raise children. During his conversations with potential matches, they have business-like discussions about who will be expected to do what in the relationship, whether they’re willing to adopt or have children through artificial insemination, and what their parents will want from a potential son or daughter-in-law. In between these exchanges, Andy takes phone calls from his father, who urges him to work harder at finding a wife, and to make more demands of potential candidates.

Cherry is in the process of ending her own fake marriage, and feels pressure from her parents to adopt a child. In China, there’s no legal way for her to adopt as a single parent or as a lesbian woman or lesbian couple, and her mother and father propose an outlandish scheme to buy unwanted babies from the hospital. Cherry says that the only time her father beat her was when he found out she was gay, and we learn from her mother that the neighbors make her feel ashamed for having a child-free daughter. They also contemplate the practical problem of who will take care of Cherry when she’s older, if she doesn’t have any children.

While Chinese laws criminalizing same-sex relationships have relaxed in the past 15 years, and Andy and Cherry are each out to at least one of their parents as well as their friend groups, they struggle with pressure to live up to their parents’ expectations, and to lead their lives as they wish. Even though it’s legal to be LGBTQ now, heteronormative cultural expectations still pathologize and stigmatize queer people by creating the sense that they aren’t living up to their adult responsibilities. It feels like Andy and Cherry are treated and viewed as the Chinese equivalent of American adults who live in their parents’ basements playing video games all day, while their parents urge them to find a job. The question of marriage equality or adoption by LGBTQ couples is so far off the table in China that the only way for Andy and Cherry to start a family, as they’re expected to do as adults, is to pretend to be straight.

Inside the Chinese Closet is an uneven film. The subject matter is interesting – and it certainly made me more aware of the nuances of LGBTQ identity in China – but it isn’t always clear why Luvara has chosen to follow these particular individuals. The press materials make it seem as if Andy’s major problem is finding a wife and Cherry’s major problem is finding a child, but it seems like the reverse is really true. As the film goes on, it seems as if Cherry is emotionally isolated, in love with a straight friend who doesn’t love her, and doesn’t actually want to have a child. Her struggle is in getting up the nerve to tell her mother to stop coming up with ridiculous schemes to buy a kid, because she doesn’t want one.

Andy, on the other hand, seems to really want a child. He blames it on his father when he discusses it with potential partners, but, from the way he talks, it sounds like he really would like to be a father. Andy’s biggest problem is that there’s no legal way for a gay man or gay couple to adopt a child in China – his dates with potential wives keep falling through, in part, because he’s afraid that they either won’t agree to have children, or will take the children when they break up with him or move abroad to live with a woman.

Many LGBTQ rights advocates in the U.S. and Canada would agree that the key changes in the last few decades have come not only from legislation but also from a growing acceptance in society of LGBTQ people. Homophobic hate groups have that right – we are promoting the message that it’s okay to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, pansexual, asexual, genderqueer, etc.; having more and more people accept that message has allowed many LGBTQ people to live fuller, more authentic lives. Inside the Chinese Closet is a reminder that, without that kind of social change – which comes slowly, and takes a lot of work – having the legal right to exist is only a small step forward. Andy and Cherry are still blocked from participating in the traditions and social structures they want to be a part of – they’re bombarded with messages that they should have families, but excluded from the joy of building families of their own with the people they love.

Compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity are still alive and well, and LGBTQ people still face stigmatization, even in countries with marriage equality. But Luvara’s film shines a light on how heteronormativity operates in an era where gay and lesbian people have enough savvy and technology to arrange fake marriages and cross-border adoptions from the comfort of their own apartments. It makes me wonder whether that’s going to speed up the march of LGBTQ rights in China or slow it even more.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

3 Women-Directed Films to See at the Los Angeles Film Festival

We love to highlight and showcase the work of women filmmakers here at Bitch Flicks. Here are three films written and directed by women you should check out at the 2016 Los Angeles Film Festival.

We love to highlight and showcase the work of women filmmakers here at Bitch Flicks. If you will be in the Los Angeles area, here are three films written and directed by women — The View from Tall, Namour, and Play the Devil — you should check out at the 2016 Los Angeles Film Festival, which runs from June 1 through June 9 at ArcLight Cinemas.

The View from Tall
Directed by Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss; Written by Caitlin Parrish
(U.S. Dramatic Competition) | June 6, 8:40pm

“Justine is like many 17-year-olds who struggle in high school: She is smart but unpopular, her parents don’t understand her and even her sister pretends not to know her in public. What sets Justine apart is that the entire school is aware of her recent sexual relationship with a teacher. Feeling both visible and ignored to uncomfortable degrees, she is mandated to see a therapist, Douglas, a disabled man with demons of his own. Justine finds a sympathetic ear in Douglas, and ultimately recognizes an equally lonely kindred spirit. As the lines of propriety between them are stretched, Justine must navigate the thorny issues of age, lust and leaving adolescent life behind.

“First-time directors Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss bring their years of theatrical experience and collaboration to this unique and rare take on female empowerment on the cusp of adulthood.” — Drea Clark

Namour
Directed/written by Heidi Saman
(LA Muse Competition) | June 5, 1:40pm

“Steven Bassem spends his evenings at an upscale restaurant among the nouveau riche elite. But he’s not there to dine; he’s there to park cars. An all-but-invisible valet, Steven is acutely aware of his dead-end situation and begins to act out erratically. As the bonds of his once tightly knit Arab-American family erode, Steven acts out in increasingly erratic ways, and struggles to figure out who he is and what he ought to be doing.

“Set in the economic recession of the late 2000’s, writer/director Heidi Saman’s debut feature film sports a bold, sleek and nuanced visual style that pays homage to Los Angeles, while capturing the city’s unique capacity for alienation as a distinctly realist backdrop to Steven’s internal turmoil.” — Cristhian Barron and Cooper Hopkins

Play the Devil
Directed/written by Maria Govan
(World Dramatic Competition) | June 4, 3:15pm

“Gregory, a gifted student from a working class family, is favorably positioned to win a coveted medical scholarship, and yet is secretly cultivating a desire to become a photographer. James, an established businessman, uses his wealth and access to pique the young man’s latent artistic inclinations. When James cannot accept Gregory’s boundaries, the relationship spirals into a fateful, carnal dance during the “Jab” (devil) play, on Carnival’s Monday night.

“Bursting with confidence, style and vision against the lush landscape of Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival, Bahamian writer/director Maria Govan’s sophomore feature complicates notions of masculinity, privilege and sexuality in this nuanced, yet brutal, coming-of-age portrait that deftly thwarts any easy moral judgments of her characters’ actions and desires.” — Roya Rastegar and Medalit Tay

All film descriptions and photos courtesy of Indie PR, used with permission.

The Manipulative Woman in Sci-Fi: Bending Time and People to Her Will

Individually, each film presents interesting, tough, somewhat complex female characters – which could be considered feminist in its own right. Taken together, however, I can’t help but see a pervasive trend that doesn’t reflect well on women. Why do filmmakers see women as master manipulators so readily? Is it simply because they believe women to be cold and calculating? Or, conversely, are they relying on audiences not seeing how tricky these women are, banking on their innocent façades to make the ending a real surprise (i.e. the ‘Basic Instinct’ effect)?

This guest post written by Claire Holland originally appeared at Razor Apple. It is cross-posted with permission. | Major spoilers ahead for the films Blood Punch, Coherence, Time Lapse, and Triangle.

I’m a huge fan of time travel thrillers, and some excellent ones have come out in the past several years. In fact, the four films I’ll be talking about today – Triangle, Time Lapse, Blood Punch, and Coherence – are four of my all-time favorites within the genre. As a disclaimer, I have to say that I deeply enjoyed all of these films, and wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone. But we’re allowed to think critically even about the things we enjoy, right? Despite loving these films, I couldn’t help but notice while watching these films that there was a conspicuous trend uniting them all – manipulative female characters. In every one of these films, a deceitful woman acts as a catalyst for the (generally unfortunate) events of the film. To be fair, some other event out of the anyone’s control causes the rift or bend in time, but it’s always a female character that underhandedly uses that time loop/lapse/rift to her advantage.

Before we get into it, though, a quick primer on the four films (although, seeing as these are time travel movies, and therefore complicated and confusing by nature, I recommend actually watching them). Time Lapse involves three friends – Callie and Finn, who are dating, and their roommate Jasper – who find a camera in their missing neighbor’s apartment that faces the window of their apartment. They soon discover that the camera’s photos show events 24 hours into the future, and try to use this to their advantage. Triangle is about Jess, a single mother who goes on a boating trip with her friends. They hit some bad weather and are forced to board what appears to be an abandoned ship, where a masked figure begins stalking and killing them. It turns out the masked figure is another version of Jess herself, trying to put an end to a time loop they’ve all been stuck in for quite some time. Coherence is the story of Em who, while at a dinner party with friends, experiences a rift in time that opens up parallel universes – some of which seem better than the one in which Em currently lives. Finally, Blood Punch revolves around Skyler, Milton, and Russell, who are stuck repeating the same day over and over again due to a Native American curse, until blood is spilled and only one person is left alive.

First of all, don’t misunderstand me – I’m not positing that any of these films set out to make an anti-feminist statement, or any statement at all, necessarily. Individually, each film presents interesting, tough, somewhat complex female characters – which could be considered feminist in its own right. Taken together, however, I can’t help but see a pervasive trend that doesn’t reflect well on women. Why do filmmakers see women as master manipulators so readily? Is it simply because they believe women to be cold and calculating? Or, conversely, are they relying on audiences not seeing how tricky these women are, banking on their innocent façades to make the ending a real surprise (i.e. the Basic Instinct effect)?

I think it’s a combination of both. The stereotype of women as emotional manipulators goes back all the way to Shakespeare (can I get a Lady Macbeth monologue?) and further. Google “women are manipulative” and you’ll find all kinds of research claiming it’s part of female biological makeup – being the “weaker” sex, women supposedly had to find other ways to survive, chief among those tactics being the manipulation of men. And society has reinforced this for, well, forever, by disempowering women and shackling their choices to the whims of men. Before 1974, a woman would have had trouble getting a credit card without her husband’s approval, so it’s no wonder if women employed a little manipulation to get what they needed. In short, the stereotype certainly still exists, even if only subconsciously, making it an easy archetype to draw on while writing a character.

Then there’s the surprise factor. Even though Basic Instinct pretty well shattered the notion that women can’t be cutthroat decades ago, these films employ the reveal of a shrewd, often merciless woman quite well. So much of each film’s runtime is spent watching men bloodily, showily batter one another in the most basic grapples for power; we’re distracted from figuring out that a woman is the one pulling all the strings, engineering the situation to her advantage, until much later. Of course, after four movies, I’d think the jig is up by now, but who knows.

While I would guess that pragmatism is most often at the root of the manipulative female character, I still find this trend troubling for one glaring reason: there is always an aspect of punishment to the character’s treatment. More often than not, the word “bitch” follows the word “manipulative,” and these stories reinforce that by indicating that the female character is bad and she deserves her situation – more so than the male characters. It’s as if attempting to shape the outcome of the situation in a way that’s favorable to her is a mortal sin, and being left to deal with the worst consequences is her penance.

Take Callie in Time Lapse, for example. Even though every character uses the photos of the future to their advantage in selfish ways that cause harm – Finn uses them to overcome his artistic block, neglecting his girlfriend in the process; Jasper uses them to gamble, putting everyone in the crosshairs of a dangerous bookie – Callie is the one who is most punished for it, when her goal is perhaps the least selfish, or at least the most sympathetic: she uses the photos to try to reignite the passion in her relationship with Finn by making him jealous. A photo shows Callie and Jasper kissing, and because the trio believes the events shown in the photos have to occur in order to avoid a paradox and keep time going along as normal, Callie and Jasper are “forced” to kiss in front of Finn. As it turns out, Callie has been secretly changing the order of the photos she shows to Finn and Jasper, presenting old photos of past transgressions (we discover she cheated on Finn with Jasper weeks ago, and the camera caught those moments) as new.

The most superficial way of looking at the situation is that Callie is a cheater who deserves everything she gets, but it is just that – superficial. The fact that Callie cheated on Finn once or twice, months ago, also points to the fact that Finn has been neglecting Callie for quite some time before the discovery of the photo machine. When Callie first finds the photo machine, she is so frantic to hide the evidence of her indiscretions and win back Finn’s love that she immediately forms a plan to do so. It’s not a malicious plan, but a desperate one, for which she is harshly punished.

Callie ends up killing Jasper in order to save Finn’s life, but when the entire scope of her manipulation is revealed, Finn rejects Callie and she kills him as well. Callie plans to warn herself of this course of events by using the photo machine so that she can change things and Finn won’t be dead or know about her manipulation, but she is interrupted by a police officer and unable to carry out the warning. Thus, Callie is doomed to her current timeline, where the love of her life is dead by her own hand, and where she will certainly be found guilty of murdering at least two (and as many as four) people. The manipulative woman is always the final witness, forced to live out the consequences of her actions – and the actions of all those around her. It is the most serious punishment, worse than death, doled out in this case for the grave sin of wanting to be loved.

The most complicated character of these three movies may be Jess in Triangle, but her motivations are only explored briefly, making the handling of her arc difficult to parse. As the single mother of an autistic child, it is revealed at the end of the film that Jess has become abusive towards her son. Jess is forced to watch herself – or rather, another version of herself in a separate time loop – abuse her son again and again. Horrified at seeing herself this way, she murders the other version of herself and takes off with her son in the car, where her frenzied driving results in his death. This sequence ends with her restarting the loop by going on the boating trip (yet again) in an effort to get to another time where her son is still alive – which spurs on the events in which she’s forced to kill her friends, and alternate versions of herself, ad nauseam.

On the one hand, Jess abuses her child – is there any adequate punishment for that? However, the Jess we see throughout most of the film seems entirely divorced from the Jess we see abusing her son at the end of the movie, and for that reason, I have a problem buying into her character as a whole. She appears to be a kind person throughout the film, and when she sees herself yelling at her son, she looks deeply dismayed and repentant. She kills the other version of herself without hesitation in an effort to protect him. For the majority of the film, she shows herself to be a loving mother who has simply been stretched too thin (it’s also hinted at that she may have been abused by her late husband), who spends every ounce of energy she has attempting to save her child’s life. There’s a disconnect between the character we get to know for 90 minutes and the one we see hitting her child for two minutes that seems mainly in place to make the viewer believe that Jess deserves to relive this agonizing loop forever.

Then there’s Em, whose fate is foreshadowed early in on Coherence. During dinner at the beginning of the film, Em explains that she lost out on an opportunity to dance the lead in a big show because she turned down the understudy part. The dancer who was supposed to do the part got sick, and the understudy who did take the job became famous. Another female guest at the dinner remarks, “So basically she stole your entire life.” Immediately, the female characters, both onscreen and off, are depicted as jealous and conniving. That depiction is reinforced when, during a comet passing that opens up alternate realities, Em finds a better reality in which she did take the understudy part, and proceeds to murder the version of herself living in that reality so she can take over. As it turns out, there are two other versions of Em wandering that reality at the same time, and though she attempts to murder them both, she only succeeds once. At the end of the film, her boyfriend receives a phone call from the other version of her that she failed to kill, and it is implied that she is about to be outed as an imposter in her own life – a feeling she already knows too well.

Once again, the punishment seems overly moralistic and self-flagellating. While other characters reveal unflattering secrets and pummel one another out in the open to little consequence, Em is, both literally and figuratively, only hurting herself throughout the film – and yet she is penalized most harshly for it. Em has obviously spent a lot of time berating herself for losing out on big opportunities. It’s unclear whether she really feels like the life she was meant to have was taken from her by someone else, or if she faults herself alone for letting it slip through her fingers, but either way, she’s not going to let opportunity pass her by yet again. She kills the alternate version of herself in an ambitious, albeit ruthless move, and she is punished dearly for that ambitiousness.

Finally – and I’ll try to keep this one short, because boy is this post getting out of hand – we have Skyler in Blood Punch, whose biggest fault appears to be that she’s smarter than the two male characters, Russell and Milton. Stuck in a time loop where the same day is played over and over again, Skyler is the first to realize that the only way out is by killing everyone else – the last person left standing will then be freed. Since she’s not strong enough to physically overcome either of her male counterparts, she uses her wits to manipulate the two men into fighting to the death. Unfortunately, her plan doesn’t go as smoothly as it could, and even after Russell and Milton are dead, she ends up trapped in the time loop again with two new people. Skyler, like Jess, is condemned to her terrible situation, possibly forever, and the audience is left feeling like she deserves it. But does she really? Because she wanted to survive – the most basic, relatable human instinct there is – and she was smart enough to figure out how to do that?

Muddying the waters further is Milton, who is a supremely likeable character, making Skyler seem all the worse. Milton thinks he loves Skyler, and is content with the idea of existing together in the time loop forever, even if it means killing Russell himself every day for eternity. Skyler recognizes what a bad idea that is – even the best couple would likely go insane being trapped in that situation forever, and Milton and Skyler barely know each other – but Milton comes off as a sweet, selfless romantic nonetheless. He serves as a foil to Skyler, highlighting her narcissism and disingenuousness, even though his motivations only take his own feelings into account and are therefore selfish as well.

Perhaps all of these films are simply metaphors for Hell, where the characters’ worst fears and traits spur on the cycle they’re doomed to live out over and over again. It’s an effective illustration, to be sure, but why is it always the women who are seen getting the worst of it? Why are they so often blamed for the very existence of Hell? In essence, the female characters are viciously punished for not being selfless every minute of every day – for sometimes being desperate, or ambitious, or for breaking down – despite the fact that the other characters surrounding them are overwhelmingly selfish as well. Even if the case can be made that these women do deserve what they get, why is it always the women who are written as the most self-centered and conniving of all characters? It’s not flattering to men, either, who populate these films as oafish idiots, lovesick dopes, and pawns.

As I’ve said, taken individually, the depictions of women in these films don’t seem nearly as damaging. Viewed together, however, I think they represent a concerning tendency to stereotype women as deceitful and untrustworthy, while men are regarded as too decent or too dumb to defend themselves. In these films’ defense, it’s the way the world has been depicted for a long, long time. In defense of women, however, I don’t think it’s all so cut-and-dried.

See also at Bitch Flicks: ‘Coherence’ Is the Best Movie You Didn’t See Last Year

Claire Holland is a freelance writer and author of Razor Apple, a blog devoted to horror movies and horror culture with a feminist bent. Claire has a BA in English and creative writing, but she insists on writing about “trashy” genre movies nonetheless. You can follow her on twitter @ClaireCWrites.

‘Sorceress’: A Flawed Telling of Women and Worship in the Middle Ages

One might expect ‘Sorceress’ to be a powerfully feminist film and a faithful portrayal of the Middle Ages. It disappoints on both counts. … For all its faults, ‘Sorceress’ remains much more attentive to women’s experiences than many films, and provides insights into village life during the Middle Ages.

This is a guest post written by Tim Covell.

[Trigger warning: rape and sexual assault]

Sorceress, also known as Le moine et la sorcière, is a 1987 French film featuring Tchéky Karyo, Christine Boisson, and Jean Carmet. It had a limited theatrical release, playing at film festivals and independent theatres, and is available in subtitled and partly dubbed English versions. The story was written by Paméla Berger, Suzanne Schiffman directed, and they co-wrote the screenplay. Berger is a founder of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the folks who gave us the seminal Our Bodies, Ourselves, and a professor of Medieval Art. With her background, one might expect Sorceress to be a powerfully feminist film and a faithful portrayal of the Middle Ages. It disappoints on both counts.

The film begins with a note stating that it is based on the writings of Étienne de Bourbon, a 13th century Dominican monk. A prologue shows his telling of the martyrdom of St. Guinefort. St. Guinefort was a dog, killed for apparently harming a baby. After his death, it is learned that he had protected the baby from a snake. The legend of the faithful animal killed in error is known in many cultures, but it was new to Étienne. In the rural area of France where he learned of it, the villagers not only considered the dog a saint, helpful to sick children, but maintained a grove and conducted healing rituals there, with the help of an old woman from another town. Étienne wrote that he preached against the practice, disinterred the dog, and burned the dog’s bones and the trees.

The film shows Étienne arriving at the village, on an inquisition and eager to see the local priest’s list of suspected heretics. He is told there are none. He soon learns of a woman who lives alone in the forest, and heals people with plants. Étienne suspects that “her practices might be irregular,” but considers her merely superstitious. Then he witnesses the ritual of healing a sick baby at Guinefort’s grove, concludes she is a witch, and arranges for her to be burned at the stake.

Berger takes numerous liberties with the source anecdote, though as a character notes, when Étienne writes of these events, he will change things so no one will know what really happened. The implication is that the film shows the true events. However, the changes introduce anachronistic and unrealistic notes, and simplify the characters. Étienne recorded the ritual as occasionally being fatal to infants. His description is consistent with similar rituals in other cultures, but the film shows that the children are never in danger. In the film, Étienne announces that he is looking for heretics, who “let women preach,” and could “destroy the church.” The comment may amuse modern audiences, who may not realize that he was likely seeking Waldensians, members of an organized movement throughout Europe, which tried to create an alternate church. Once Etienne hears of “suspicious acts of healing,” the film has him morph into a witch hunter. Extensive prosecution of witches came hundreds of years after the time of Étienne, and at his time witchcraft was not heresy.

De Bourbon had been a Dominican, travelling in rural areas for at least a dozen years before he became an inquisitor. However, the film introduces him as a dogmatic bumbler, and eventually reveals him to be a rapist. Clearly, he’s the bad guy. We learn through a flashback that as a teenager, he fled from the sight of a deer being gutted. It is hard to imagine that a rural youth in the 13th century would find this shocking, but the film distracts us from this oddity by trying to shock the viewer, briefly showing the gutting, and in a much closer view than the character’s perspective.

The older woman from the neighboring town is, in the film, a young attractive healer living in the forest. She may have been younger, and she may well have been a healer — women’s healing work was often unrecorded in history. However, it is less likely she lived in the forest, and her modern sensibilities with regard to plants, the natural world, and her appreciation of literacy are out of place. Early on, the film shows her pulling a thorn from a wolf’s paw. She’s the good guy. She became an outsider after her lord exercised “his first night’s rights” (she was raped), and her husband killed the lord. First night’s rights were often claimed to have existed during the middle ages by later writers, but there is no contemporary evidence for them. As with the story of the wrongly killed protective animal, first night’s rights have been written about in many cultures, going back to Gilgamesh.

The presentation of legends as fact, the anachronisms, and the one-dimensional characters weaken the story and the representation of life in the Middle Ages. Some of these aspects may have been intended to emphasize the overlooked participation and subordination of women, but they are not always effective. The reference to first night’s rights could have been a symbol for the position of women in society, but the timing and method of the presentation reduce it to a backstory footnote. Étienne’s writings about the ritual make only brief mention of an older woman who assists the ritual, but in the film this woman is young, attractive, and a source of sexual tension. It’s easy to accept that this may have been the reality, and Étienne downplayed this when he wrote about the incident, as a way of erasing her from history. However, it is also possible that the filmmakers thought, in typical Hollywood fashion, that the female lead should be conventionally young and attractive.

The film makes other efforts to celebrate women and the feminine. The first image in the film is a baby at the breast. A strong female character exists in a subplot, and the home of the forest women is lush green woods, while Étienne’s place is the dark and sterile church. Guinefort’s grove is a place to heal babies, and therefore a place for the women of the village. Unfortunately, the efforts to celebrate the feminine are undercut because, despite the title, the film is a story about a man’s growth and redemption.

The plot is structured around Étienne’s visit to the village. The forest woman intrigues him. But it is a man who shows him the error of his ways, another man who tells him how he can learn from this, and the climax is a pissing contest between Étienne and a local lord. Visuals also emphasize that this is Étienne’s story. This is most obvious is when we share his gaze of a revealed ankle. Significantly, we are shown traumatic events in his past, from his perspective, while the past traumas of the forest woman are merely narrated, making her a less sympathetic character. Finally, in a film which claims to reveal much of what may have been silenced, an important female character is mute, with a man to speak for her.

Sorceress shows that Étienne eventually agreed to allow the worship of St. Guinefort to continue, and in a closing note states: “The last woman healer to protect babies at the grove died in 1930.” This statement is both misleading and less interesting than the historical evidence. No information exists about a continuous line of healers, but the legend of St. Guinefort persisted. In the early 1930s, a woman in the area would go on substitute pilgrimages to Guinefort’s grove and other places, on behalf of sick children’s parents, if they paid her a small fee. She would also light candles and go to church for others, cast spells (but not against anyone who gave her meat), offer flowers, weed graves, and beg at a regular circuit of houses. She had been widowed in 1910, had one stillborn child, and lived alone until her death in 1936 at age eighty-eight. This is presumably the woman whose sad but interesting life was both acknowledged and downplayed as “the last woman healer.”

When I first saw the film, decades ago, I was impressed by the foregrounding of women’s experiences. With subsequent viewings, a greater knowledge of film, and a greater knowledge of history, I’ve become more aware of the film’s relatively superficial approach. However, it is entirely possible that in the 1980s the film could not have been financed had truly focused on the forest women, past and present. Even today, that might prove difficult. For all its faults, Sorceress remains much more attentive to women’s experiences than many films, and provides insights into village life during the Middle Ages.

Recommended Reading: The New York Times Review/Film; ‘Sorceress,’ A Medieval Parable

Tim Covell has degrees in English Literature, Film Studies, and Canadian Studies. He studies film censorship and classification systems, which are largely about managing representations of sexuality. More at www.covell.ca.

Calling “Action”: A Lesbian Female Filmmaker on Diversity in Action Films

I was reminded of the importance of telling stories that incorporate minorities and women, who so often don’t get our stories told. … As a lesbian female filmmaker, the biggest barrier to success in Hollywood is always financing.

This is a guest post written by Miranda Sajdak. She is currently crowdfunding her film No Trace.

When I was young, I was taken to see the film A League of Their Own. I still remember the excitement of watching the women’s baseball teams go head-to-head, and the rush of leaving the theater, knowing I wanted to make movies and re-create that experience for others. It took a lot of years – and a lot of movies — to find that same balance of blockbuster and pure entertainment factor in films I was watching.

One day, a co-worker (at my then-job on the metal show Uranium) suggested that I check out the film Ong-Bak. I had no idea I’d be in for one of the most kickass action films I’d ever seen. I was reminded of why I got into movies to begin with – to make entertaining films that engage the viewer so much, they can’t help but leave the theater energized and excited. I remembered the first time I felt that way, watching A League of Their Own, and was reminded of the importance of telling stories that incorporate minorities and women, who so often don’t get our stories told. Other films and TV shows that have influenced me since include The Long Kiss Goodnight, District B13, Damages, and Banshee. Any time there’s great action, crime drama, and fun characters, I’m there.

As an action fan who’s also passionate about diversity, it sometimes feels like we’re the black sheep of the film world; we don’t get the same sort of attention that genre-lovers in horror and comedy do, even when we show up opening weekend to Salt, popcorn in hand, ready to be blown away by some high-energy stunts. But that doesn’t make us action fans any less passionate or devoted to our genre of choice.

I’ve long been a proponent of equality in the film landscape. While my first favorite being an almost-entirely female cast influenced me towards finding ways to showcase diversity in my own work, my prime goal has always been: be entertaining – and incorporate underrepresented cast and crew members, because inclusivity matters, and will keep the story fresh and engaging. As an award-winning screenwriter, I’ve also found that incorporating diversity into my projects makes them more engaging on the page.

To that end, I recently decided to direct a new project, starring Heroes’ James Kyson and Grey’s Anatomy’s Pia Shah, called No Trace. My film follows an undercover cop who robs a bank for the mob, only to find herself on the run from her former partners. There’s a killer fight scene, some great dialogue, and a surprise ending that you won’t see coming.

As I have written:

“The statistics for women directors in film are pretty dismal, with only 9% of the top films in 2015 directed by women (via USC’s Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative), the same rate as in 1998! One of the most important things we can do to make a change is to promote female-directed projects. I hope to inspire other women and girls to make their movies, too.”

As a lesbian female filmmaker, the biggest barrier to success in Hollywood is always financing. I’ve put together a killer team, including Oscar winner James Parris on VFX, with Derek Bauer on camera and Natalie Nicole Gilbert on music. Our team started a crowdfunding page at gofundme.com/MirandaDirects to help achieve our goal of making this film a reality. We were thrilled to make our first goal, and are now approaching our stretch goals with the same drive and determination we’re putting towards producing this film. We hope you’ll be a part of it, and support women filmmakers and diversity in the independent action realm.

For more, check out our site, or follow us on Twitter:
@MirandaSajdak – Writer/Director
@IAmDellanyPeace – Producer
@JamesKyson – Lead
@piajune – Lead
@plasterofparris – VFX Supervisor

Miranda Sajdak is a director/writer/producer currently living in Los Angeles. As a script reader, she has done coverage for producers of films ranging from indie hits like Drive to studio features including Final Destination, American Pie, and Everest, as well as television shows Huge and My So-Called Life. She co-founded company Harbor Road Entertainment in 2015, working as a producer, director, and writer, as well as providing script notes and proofreading to writers in the industry. She was a winner of Go Into the Story‘s Quest Initiative in 2013. She was also a winner of The Next MacGyver competition in 2015, paired with mentor Clayton Krueger at Scott Free to develop original pilot RIVETING. She enjoys hard-hitting dramas, dark comedies, and ’90s legal thrillers.

Women Directors Week: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Women Directors Theme Week here.

Women with a Camera: How Women Directors Can Change the Cinematic Landscape by Emanuela Betti

What I saw… was the problem women have faced for centuries: the popularity of woman as art subject, not as creator. What critics and award judges seem to love are not so much women’s stories, but women’s stories told by men. Stories in which women’s agency is strictly and safely in the hands of a male auteurs. … We need more women filmmakers — not as a way to fill quotas, but because women’s stories are different, unique, and need to be told.

Why Eve’s Bayou Is a Great American Art Film by Amirah Mercer

The story of a family burdened by salacious and supernatural secrets in 1962 Louisiana, the movie has become one of the finer American films in the Southern gothic tradition; but with a Black director and an all-Black cast, Eve’s Bayou has been unceremoniously booted from its deserving recognition as the fantastic, moody art film it is.

Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon as Feminist Horror by Dawn Keetley

The film thus brilliantly puts the everyday (marriage) on a continuum with the horrifying (possession?), connecting the problem of Bea’s troubled self-expression and containment, now that she’s married, to the later seemingly supernatural plot. … Are the seemingly supernatural elements of the plot symbolic of Bea’s struggles with intimacy and the weighty expectations of married domestic life (sex, cooking, and reproduction)? Janiak’s expert writing and directing definitely leaves open this possible subtext of the film…

When Love Looks Like Me: How Gina Prince-Bythewood Brought Real Love to the Big Screen by Shannon Miller

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s choice to center these themes around a young Black couple shouldn’t feel as revolutionary as it does. But when you consider that “universal” is too often conflated with “white,” Love & Basketball feels like such a turning point in the romance genre. It was certainly a turning point for me because, for a moment, Black love and romance, as told by Hollywood, weren’t mutually exclusive.

Sofia Coppola as Auteur: Historical Femininity and Agency in Marie Antoinette by Marlana Eck

Sofia Coppola’s film conveys, to me, a range of feminist concerns through history. Concerns of how much agency, even in a culture of affluence, women can wield given that so much of women’s lives are dictated by the structures of patriarchy.

The Gender Trap and Women Directors by Jenna Ricker

But, when was the last time ANYONE sat down to write a story, or direct a project and asked themselves — Is this story masculine or feminine? Exactly none, I suspect. … Storytellers tell stories, audiences engage, the formula is quite simple. But, it only works one way — male filmmakers are able to make any film they want without biased-loaded gender questions, whereas women filmmakers always face more scrutiny and criticism.

Individuality in Lucia Puenzo’s XXY, The Fish Child, and The German Doctor by Sara Century

In the end, it is this focus on individuality that is the most striking common theme of Lucia Puenzo’s works. Each of her characters undergoes intense scrutiny from outside forces, be it Alex in ‘XXY’ for their gender, Lala in ‘The Fish Child’ for her infatuation with Ailin, or Lilith from ‘The German Doctor,’ who is quite literally forced into a physical transformation by a Nazi.

Andrea Arnold: A Voice for the Working Class Women of Britain by Sophie Hall

British director/screenwriter Andrea Arnold has three short films and three feature films under her belt, and four out of six of those center on working class people. … [The characters in Fish Tank, Wasp, Red Road, and Wuthering Heights] venture off away from the preconceived notions they have been given, away from the stereotypes forced upon them, and the boxes society has trapped them in.

Susanne Bier’s Living, Breathing Body of Work by Sonia Lupher

Women consistently make good films around the world, even if we have to look outside Hollywood to find them. Susanne Bier is one powerful example. Her vivid, probing explorations into family dynamics and tenuous relationships are fiercely suggestive marks of a female auteur that deserves recognition.

No Apologies: The Ambition of Gillian Armstrong and My Brilliant Career by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

However, Armstrong also doesn’t mock Sybylla’s ambition or treat it as a joke. In Armstrong’s world, the fact that Sybylla has desires and wants outside of marriage and men is treated seriously because Sybylla takes it seriously. She never needs to prove herself worthy enough for her desires. … [She is] a woman who bravely acts according to her own desires, someone willing to risk everything in order to have what she wants and who recognizes that men and romance are not the sum total of her world.

OMG a Vagina: The Struggle for Artistic The Struggle for Feminine Artistic Integrity in Kimberly Peirce’s Carrie by Horrorella

Carrie is a terrifying and compelling story, but there is certainly something to be gained and perhaps a certain truth to be found in watching the pain of her journey into womanhood as told by a woman director. … But even in the face of these small victories, we have to wonder how the film would have been different had Peirce been allowed to tell this story without being inhibited by the fear and discomfort of the male voices around her.

Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark: Busting Stereotypes and Drawing Blood by Lee Jutton

Both brutally violent and shockingly sexy, Near Dark’s influence can be felt nearly thirty years later on a new crop of unusual vampire dramas that simultaneously embrace and reject the conventions of the genre. … Yet among all these films about outsiders, Near Dark will always have a special place in my heart for being the one to show me that as a filmmaker, I was not alone in the world after all.

Fangirls, It’s Time to #AskForMore by Alyssa Franke

In the battle to address the staggering gender gap in women directing for film and television, there is one huge untapped resource — the passion and organizing power of fangirls.

Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season: Black Lives in a White Season by Shara D. Taylor

It is doubtful that anyone else could have made A Dry White Season as poignantly relevant as Euzhan Palcy did. Her eye for the upending effects of apartheid on Black families brings their grievances to bear. … The meaning behind Palcy’s work resounds clearly: Black lives matter in 1976 South Africa as they do in 2016 America.

Why Desperately Seeking Susan Is One of My Favorite Films by Alex Kittle

The character was created to be an icon, a model for Roberta and other women like her, an image to hold in our heads of what life could be like if we just unleashed our inner pop star. But she’s also real enough that it feels like you might spot her in a hip nightclub, dancing uninhibited and having more fun than anyone else there just because she’s being herself.

Movie You Need to Be Talking About: Advantageous by Candice Frederick

Directed and co-written by Jennifer Phang, Advantageous is a surprisingly touching and purposeful film that revitalizes certain elements of the sci-fi genre while presenting two powerful voices in women filmmakers: Jennifer Phang and Jacqueline Kim.

Concussion: When Queer Marriage in the Suburbs Isn’t Enough by Ren Jender

The queer women we see in sexual situations in Concussion are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in Blue is the Warmest Color: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.

I’m a Lilly – And You’re Probably One Too: All Women Face Gender Discrimination by Rachel Feldman

Another obstacle to getting Ledbetter made is the industry’s perception of my value as the film’s director. There are certainly a handful of women directors whose identities are well known, but generally, even colleagues in our industry, when asked, can only name a handful of female directors. Of course, there are thousands of amazingly talented women directing; in fact there are 1,350 experienced women directors in our Guild, but for the vast majority of us our credits are devalued and we struggle to be seen and heard – just like Lilly.

Making a Murderer, Fantastic Lies, and the Uneasy Exculpation Narratives by Women Directors by Eva Phillips

What is most remarkable and perhaps most subversively compelling about both ‘Making a Murderer’ and ‘Fantastic Lies,’ and about the intentions and directorial choices of their respective creators, is that neither documentary endeavor chronicles the sagas of particularly defensible — or even, to some, at all likable — men.

Lena Dunham and the Creator’s “Less-Than-Perfect” Body On-Screen by Sarah Halle Corey

Every time someone calls to question the fact that Lena Dunham parades her rolls of fat in front of her audience, we need to examine why they’re questioning it. Is it because they’re wondering how it serves the narrative of ‘Girls’? Or is it because they’re balking at “less-than-perfection” (according to normative societal conventions) in the female form?

Female Becomingness Through Maya Deren’s Lens in Meshes of the Afternoon by Allie Gemmill

Her most famous work, Meshes of the Afternoon becomes, in this way, a reading of a woman working with and against herself through splitting into multiple iterations of herself. Most importantly, the film unpacks the notion that not only is the dream-landscape of a woman complex, it is bound tightly to her, defining who she is and guiding her constantly through the world like a compass.

Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy: Heartbreak in a Panning Shot by ThoughtPusher

Through the course of the film, Kelly Reichardt’s pacing is so deliberate that even the most ordinary moments seem intensely significant. Reichardt’s framing traps Wendy in shots as much as her broken-down car and lack of money trap her in the town.

Sofia Coppola and The Silent Woman by Paulette Reynolds

Many films touch upon the theme of female isolation, but I remain fascinated with Sofia Coppola’s three major cinematic creations that explore the world of The Silent Woman: The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and Marie Antoinette (2006). Each film delves into this enigma, forming a multifaceted frame of reference for a shared understanding.

The Anti-Celebrity Cinema of Mary Harron: I Shot Andy Warhol, The Notorious Bettie Page, and The Anna Nicole Story by Elizabeth Kiy

I’ve always thought Mary Harron’s work was the perfect example of why we need female directors. I think the films she produces provide a perspective we would never see in a world unilaterally controlled by male filmmakers. Harron appears to specialize in off-beat character studies of the types of people a male director may not gravitate towards, nor treat with appropriate gravitas. She treats us to humanizing takes on sex workers and sex symbols, angry lesbians and radical feminism and makes them hard to turn away from.

How Women Directors Turn Narrative on Its Head by Laura Power

Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl), Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know), and the women directors of Jane the Virgin are infusing elements of whimsy into their work in strikingly different ways, but to similar effect. The styles they’re using affect the audience’s relationship with their stories and with the characters themselves by giving the viewer an insight that traditional narratives don’t provide.

Wadjda: Empowering Voices and Challenging Patriarchy by Sarah Mason

Haifaa al-Mansour casts an eye onto the complexity of navigating an autocratic patriarchal society in Wadjda. This bold voice from Saudi Arabia continues to empower voices globally.

Mary Harron’s American Psycho: Rogue Feminism by Dr. Stefan Sereda

American Psycho fails the Bechdel Test. … The script, co-written by Guinevere Turner and Mary Harron, eschews any appeal to women’s empowerment. … When the leading man isn’t laughing at remarks from serial killers about decapitating girls, he’s coming after sex workers with chainsaws (at least in his head). Yet American Psycho espouses a feminist perspective that fillets the values held by capitalist men.

21 Short Films by Women Directors by Film School Shorts

For Women’s History Month, we’ve put together a playlist of 21 of those films for your viewing pleasure. As you’ll see, no two of these shorts are alike. They deal with topics like autism, racism, sexism, losing a loved one and trying to fit in and find yourself at any age.

Evolution in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Chicken With Plums by Colleen Clemens

In a similar way to Marji (Persepolis), Nasser (Chicken with Plums) must be sent far away to have his journey of becoming. There is something in him — talent — that requires he must go beyond his home. But whereas in Marji’s case she must go away to protect herself, Nasser must go away so he can grow, get bigger and fuller and richer.

Vintage Viewing: Alice Guy-Blaché, Gender-Bending Pioneer by Brigit McCone

When was the last time we watched vintage female-authored films and discussed their art or meaning? Bitch Flicks presents Vintage Viewing — a monthly feature for viewing and discussing the films of cinema’s female pioneers. Where better to start than history’s first film director, Alice Guy-Blaché?

Leigh Janiak’s ‘Honeymoon’ as Feminist Horror

This guest post written by Dawn Keetley appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Although their numbers appear to be on the rise, women directors of horror are still relatively scarce. I’m always excited, then, when I can add another film to the growing list of exceptional horror films directed by a woman, a list that includes Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987), Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary (1989), Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Jen and Sylvia Soska’s American Mary (2012), Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), and Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009) along with her even better The Invitation (2015).

Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon (2014), which is currently streaming on Netflix, unambiguously belongs on that list. As well as directing the film, Janiak also co-wrote it, with Phil Graziadei.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iZLPNFWLxk

The film focuses on a recently and (seemingly) happily-married couple, Bea (Rose Leslie) and Paul (Harry Treadaway), who are heading on a delayed honeymoon to the cottage in the woods where Bea grew up. Things go swimmingly until Paul discovers one night that Bea is gone. He eventually finds her (in a highly creepy moment) standing in the woods, in a state of dazed and virtual unconsciousness (think Katie in Paranormal Activity, although it’s even more unsettling since Bea and Paul are deep in the woods, not on a suburban patio). The couple writes the strange event off to sleepwalking — albeit with a hefty dose of anxious self-deception, since Bea has never walked in her sleep before.

From that night on, though, Bea’s behavior becomes increasingly strange. She’s withdrawn, silent, wanders off, and scribbles obsessively in her journal. And she starts to change: she uses words that aren’t quite right (saying she’s going to “take a sleep” rather than “take a nap”). She is apparently unable to remember things about herself, about Paul, and about their relationship. And Paul overhears her practicing ways to tell him she doesn’t want to have sex. Shortly after, events spiral into the horrific.

It’s never completely clear what happens to Bea, and Janiak brilliantly keeps that question open by evoking several possibilities, not least through covert references to other horror films. Since Bea’s strange behavior begins after she and Paul meet a man from her past, it seems at first that this could be an adultery film (Unfaithful, 2002). Or is it a possession film (The Shining, 1980, Paranormal Activity, 2007)? An alien film (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956, and the recent They Look Like People, 2015)? A zombie/infection film (The Evil Dead, 1981, Cabin Fever, 2002, or Severed, 2005)? I thought of all these possibilities at different moments, prompted by the film’s rich suggestiveness.

There are also definite hints in Honeymoon of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Stepford Wives (1975), both films about paranoia and violence within a seemingly banal domesticity. Janiak’s camera, along with the screenplay, creates a stifling claustrophobia around Bea and Paul as they head off into the woods alone together, the drive overlaid with voiceovers of stories about their first date and their wedding, all signaling an extreme insularity. Indeed, the film starts with a shot of Bea recording herself (somewhat unwillingly) on camera at their wedding, saying: “I guess I’m the first one to do this. I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to say. I’m now a wife.” These opening lines of the film link her becoming “wife” (about which Bea herself seems incredulous) to an inability to speak, as if marriage has silenced her — and certainly, whatever happens to her later in the woods (is it just her honeymoon, in the end?) disrupts her ability to speak even more violently. As Bea speaks (or tries to) at the beginning, she is visually confined by a camera, by the car, and by the stark lines of roads, overpasses, and trees. The film thus brilliantly puts the everyday (marriage) on a continuum with the horrifying (possession?), connecting the problem of Bea’s troubled self-expression and containment, now that she’s married, to the later seemingly supernatural plot.

Once they get to the cottage, cracks soon surface in Bea and Paul’s marriage — tellingly, around the issue of babies. After their first night together, Paul tells Bea that she needs to “rest her womb,” a strange comment to which Rose reacts badly, saying she isn’t sure she wants a baby. Paul’s comment, which seems to surprise both of them, and which is clearly precipitated by the fact that they are now married, tellingly anticipates all the strange things Rose will say once she is “possessed” (or whatever it is that happens to her). Janiak suggests, more than once then, that perhaps it is marriage that is an utterly alien state.

It also becomes clear that Bea and Paul have some profound differences: Bea hunts, fishes and embraces the outdoors, and Paul seems more comfortable in the cabin. His constant closeness to her in the many interior scenes seems oppressive, seems to exert a pressure on her to stay with him, indoors. Indeed, the viewer soon senses that the claustrophobia we feel about their relationship (well, I certainly did) may well be shared by Bea.

The claustrophobia that infuses the film, and the sense that Bea is not immune to its grasp, is intensified by one of the clearest intertextual references in the film: Bea starts writing her name and her husband’s name (“My name is Bea,” “My husband’s name is Paul”) over and over in her journal, and the evocation of The Shining is clear, specifically Jack Nicholson’s character slowly losing his grasp on reality when trapped in a snow-bound hotel with his wife and son and with the demands his family inevitably imposes. Bea’s repetitive writing of her husband’s name, and things about their relationship, moreover, mimics the way, early in the film, they had told stories about their relationship, pushing what might have seemed benign in the beginning into the realm of something more disturbing. Bea seems to be trying to paper over the cracks, to convince herself she’s something (“wife”) that deep down she doesn’t want to be.

This is where The Stepford Wives in particular comes in: are the seemingly supernatural elements of the plot symbolic of Bea’s struggles with intimacy and the weighty expectations of married domestic life (sex, cooking, and reproduction)? Janiak’s expert writing and directing definitely leaves open this possible subtext of the film — especially given what happens at the end.
The ending, which I won’t give away, draws on several scenes in the film in which rope figures prominently, as Bea and Paul take turns tying each other up for various reasons. The meanings of these scenes increasingly turns toward the sinister, from play toward overt entrapment. While it’s Bea who gets tied up at first, the tables are turned at the end in ways that could be expressing desires that Bea may not have allowed herself consciously to feel, and that are expressed instead through the plot of her “possession.”

The use of ropes in the film actually reminded me of the late nineteenth-century short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In this story, the narrator, who has just given birth, is forced to “rest” in bed by her physician-husband (just as Paul tells Bea to “rest her womb”), and the coerced and numbing inactivity of body and mind impels the narrator into madness (raising another possibility for what happens to Bea). At the end of the story, the narrator ties herself up with a rope and is creeping around her room, a scene so horrifying to her husband that he faints. In Gilman’s story, the rope (as well as the entrapping room itself) represents the confines of patriarchal marriage — and I would argue that uses rope very much the same way, although the film’s final instance of someone getting tied up pretty much completely inverts Gilman’s ending.

The weight of this film rests on its two actors, who are virtually alone, with the fleeting (albeit important) appearance of a man from Bea’s past and his wife. Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway are both absolutely sensational, superbly carrying this weight. Leslie does a fantastic job of expressing a sense of disquiet (in her marriage) well before things turn toward the truly strange — and Treadaway is great at expressing the kind of unambiguous, puppy-dog adoration — the desire never to let his wife out of his sight — that undoubtedly produces Bea’s ambivalence.

While what happens to Rose and Paul may in the end be about forces beyond their control, like every good horror film, Honeymoon exploits the cracks in “normality” before the truly uncanny erupts. Janiak (whose previous credits as director include only a couple of TV episodes) both knows good horror films (referencing them throughout) and knows how to make one.

I should add that it seems Sony has tapped Janiak to direct and co-write (along with Graziadei, her partner from Honeymoon) the upcoming remake of the 1996 cult hit, The Craft. As The Hollywood Reporter points out:

“The news of a female director coming on board to direct a female-centric feature project is welcome news to Hollywood, as it breaks after the studios have come under fire from the American Civil Liberties Union for ‘systemic failure to hire women directors at all levels of the film and television industry.’ Janiak’s hiring was already weeks in the works; the filmmaker impressed execs with her take on a female empowerment tale.”

Like The Craft, I think Honeymoon, too, is a “female empowerment tale,” as well as an extremely good horror tale. Leigh Janiak is definitely a director to look out for!

This post is revised and expanded from a review that appeared on a blog Dawn Keetley co-runs, about all things horror Horror Homeroom. She also teaches gothic and horror literature, film, and TV at Lehigh University in PA and has edited a collection of essays on The Walking Dead entitled We’re All Infected (McFarland, 2014).

‘Making a Murderer,’ ‘Fantastic Lies,’ and the Uneasy Exculpation Narratives by Women Directors

This guest post written by Eva Phillips appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault]

Within the first five minutes of both Fantastic Lies (directed by Marina Zenovich) — the most recent, methodically investigative installment of ESPN’s documentary film series, 30 for 30 — and Making a Murderer (directed by Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi) — the outlandishly popular and blisteringly sensational Netflix original series — impressively grand, birds-eye-view tracking shots are presented of the respective towns that played stage to the respective crimes at the center of the documentaries. Quietly idyllic and quaintly derelict, these introductory shots of Durham, North Carolina — home to Duke University and the young men of the Duke Lacrosse team accused of rape in 2006 — and Manitowoc County, Wisconsin — otherwise unknown home of Steven Avery, accused and exonerated of sexual assault in 1985 and re-indicted for first degree murder in 2007 — are not unfamiliar documentary tropes. However, solidifying their provocative and distinct styles and points of view, the ways in which these women employ their aerial shots of small towns, soon to be ravaged by controversies, are testaments to their acumen, and the disturbingly contentious nature of their films.

The shots would be otherwise unremarkable were it not for the stark juxtapositions and establishing of voice that the cinematic techniques achieve, and what they subtly intimate about the women helming each project. For Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, the sweeping captures of Manitowoc County and the labyrinth-esque junkyard owned by Avery’s family (and alleged site of the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach) are part of the opening sequence of every episode of Making a Murderer, and are interposed with childhood photos of Avery, extreme close-ups of the decaying Avery home, and portentously ironic court documents and police officers. In the series first episode, these tracking shots nestled in the opening credits come directly after home footage of Avery’s release after his exoneration in 2003, that is jubilant, liberated, but haunted by his cousin’s premonition that, “Manitowoc county is not done with you…they are not even close to being done with you.” In Marina Zenovich’s opening frames of Fantastic Lies, the tracking shots of Durham are prefaced with videos of the Duke men’s lacrosse team suffering an emotional championship loss to Johns Hopkins, and embedded with interviews of parents lauding the boys determination to succeed, and North Carolina Central University professor Shawn Cunningham anthropomorphizing Durham as a city desperately trying to find its identity.

Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich, by using traditional, seemingly innocuous aerial tracking shots of two towns interplayed with foreboding soundbites and poignant videos, achieve a narrative perspective that is as provocative as it is subdued. Creating worlds in which easily reviled or vilified men are at dire odds with (metonymic) towns that detest their very essence, Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich as occluded intermediaries — they can at once see the entire town and infiltrate its intricacies and complications, and they can expose the inner workings of their subjects, their virtues and foibles. These women not only position themselves as intermediaries, but as exculpatory executors specifically of men otherwise caricatured and reduced.

What is most remarkable and perhaps most subversively compelling about both Making a Murderer and Fantastic Lies, and about the intentions and directorial choices of their respective creators, is that neither documentary endeavor chronicles the sagas of particularly defensible — or even, to some, at all likable — men. The alleged perpetrators in each case are from radically different socioeconomic strata (the small town, meagerly educated Avery would balk at the world of the uber-affluent, high-pressure Duke students), though both suffer fraught relationships with the law — the young men at Duke accused of rape but eventually cleared of any guilt; and Steven Avery, though erroneously charged with rape, is now serving a life sentence for first degree murder. But what the men most noticeably share is their almost archetypal “bad guy” aura, and the simultaneously unflinching and accommodating manner in which Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich display every facet of their subjects.

Arguably dealing with more of a moral quagmire (despite their now being cleared of the charges), Zenovich, who brilliantly tackled an equally problematic man in her 2008 Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, opens her film with the barrage of soundbites, even from Duke alum Dan Abrams, citing the brash braggadocio of the men on the lacrosse team — their elitism, their “cockiness,” their hulking physiques and awareness of social prestige, their perpetuating “golf culture with an attitude.” Indeed, as the film progresses, unfolding in the manner the news media first exposed the case, Zenovich leaves no factual, disconcerting detail uncovered — the notorious raucousness and drunken offenses the team was known for; the fact that the boys held the party and intentionally hired exotic dancers (though, the detail of the boys requesting white dancers is skirted away from) and in the throes of profound inebriation, brandished a broomstick in a sexually suggestive manner and spewing racial epithets. Even the outrageously inflammatory and derogatory email — in which a player, referencing American Psycho, “jokingly” tells his teammates he is going to murder, flay and desecrate strippers — is discussed.

But amidst the revelations of the perniciousness of the men’s behavior, Zenovich carefully and seamlessly weaves in tearful, anguished testimonials from the parents of three boys (Reade Seligmann, Colon Finnerty and David Evans) falsely identified by the alleged victim, Crystal Mangum, and stalwart admissions of miscarriages of justice by former teammates. As Zenovich masterfully reaches the climax of the film, gradually and organically constructing doubt as she eventually depicts the overzealousness of prosecutor Mike Nifong and the dearth of physical evidence that would exonerate the players, the boys have been valorized. Moreover, the town of Durham, once an aerial shot at the beginning of Zenovich’s film, is micro-analyzed and cast as the embittered and disenfranchised foe of the boys, represented and led astray by the deceitfulness of Nifong. Zenovich presents a fractious clash of worlds in which a team of white, safeguarded men have the names slandered and privileged unhinged, and emerge triumphant victims.

In true subaltern treatment, Crystal Mangum is dissected by friends, and never speaks (though, as Zenovich shows, the prison where she is being held for an unrelated second-degree murder refused to let her speak to Zenovich despite her desire to) except for recorded media confessions and apologies of her false accusations. Her supposed instability is extrapolated upon, coupled with repeated shots of photos of her staggering and falling at the party. However, Mangum still “stands by her story” of surviving sexual assault and ten years later, speaking to Vocativ, “she maintained that she was assaulted.”

Demos and Ricciardi, whose Making a Murderer project was an arduous, ten year, post-graduate venture (rather than Zenovich’s year long, at times thwarted immersion into the lacrosse scandal), understandably present a much more involved, complicated portrait of their male subject, Steven Avery (and to some extent, his imprisoned cousin and alleged co-conspirator Brendan Dassey). Certainly lacking the prototypical self-impressed, egotistical athlete reputation that adulterated much of the Duke handlings, Avery, as Demos and Ricciardi briefly show (through exquisite cinematography, using letters and rare reenactments, one should add) was plagued with his own demons — arrests for animal cruelty, disorderly conduct, aggressive behavior towards relatives (which, arguably, would spur the false rape conviction), and violent, disquieting threats written to his former wife while their marriage dissolved. Yet in the hundreds of hours whittled down to the expertly directed series, Avery, while often maligned, seemingly simple-minded, ill-behaving but not necessarily menacing, is always shot through a sympathetic (often, emphasizing the pathetic) lens. Much of this is testament to the directing duos unfettered commitment to showing the complete multifariousness of the case as they lived each moment with the family, dedicated to Avery’s case for a decade from the moment they stumbled upon the now infamous New York Times front page article. And much of the fixation and implicit empathy for Avery is a result of Demos and Ricciardi’s pursuit to hyper-focus on the failures of the justice system. But much like Fantastic Lies, Avery (and more pitifully, Dassey) is positioned, much more effectively, as a steamrolled victim of law and order run amok, and a town’s collective antipathy for a man and his family (for much different reasons than with the Duke boys) galvanizing the destruction of a man’s life.

Similar to Fantastic Lies, too, is the quiet lionization of these men in the wake of crimes (whether they are irrefutable or exaggerated and falsified) against women who are noticeably underrepresented in the documentaries. Teresa Halbach, whose body is found on Avery’s property after taking photographs at his junkyard for a car magazine, is shown only through aching archival footage; her family, primarily represented by her brother (who, as a rabid Making a Murderer conspiracy theorist, I find to be suspiciously portrayed), is a minimal presence at best. Though the duo beautifully achieve a scornful eye at the fallible justice system and the prevailing sentiments castigating Avery, a looming partiality ripples through Making a Murderer that problematizes the series as an exculpatory venture.

It should be noted that I am an ardent fan of both Zenovich’s and Demos and Ricciardi’s projects. Foremost I am thrilled that not only two women, but two queer women in a relationship helmed the wildly popular Making a Murderer. Furthermore, I was riveted by its reinvigoration of my childhood fascination with crime sagas, with Demos and Ricciardi’s nuanced and meticulous style, analysis of every detail, and penchant for the gorgeously tragic. Their flawless removal of themselves — seemingly something unachievable by the more egomaniacal strain of sensationalized male documentary filmmakers — but consecration of their voices is haunting, and a tribute to their years of investment and toil (through which, I am flabbergasted, they preserved their loving relationship). I too am elated, and to some degree relieved, a woman directed the masterful reflection on the Duke scandal — an imbroglio I witnessed with conflicted emotions, as a teenager beginning to develop my feminism, as a lacrosse player of eight years, as someone who knew players on the team.

Certainly, these analyses of the bungles and undeniable violations on the part of the justice system need to be examined, and it is a boon that these women take part in the burgeoning presence of women documentary filmmakers (though still infuriatingly small compared to male counterparts). Certainly, too, Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich fastidiously show how individuals’ agency is stripped, and their identities elaborately reconstructed by tendentious external powers (media, the legal system, troubled communities). But the lingering effects of these projects, of the specific focus on men in tempestuous situations, and the resonations of these exculpatory endeavors leaves unease. It is the unease that pinches when the only individual to mention the dangers to rape survivors after a false accusation is a media fiasco is a strong-jawed, former Duke lacrosse player on the team during the incident. It is an unease that is as profoundly discomforting and ambiguous as the elements at play in the discombobulated and life-altering cases these women so extraordinarily portray.

Eva Phillips is constantly surprised at how remarkably Southern she in fact is as she adjusts to social and climate life in The Steel City. Additionally, Eva thoroughly enjoys completing her Master’s Degree in English, though really wishes that more of her grades could be based on how well she researches Making a Murdererconspiracy theories whilst pile-driving salt-and-vinegar chips. You can follow her on Instagram at @menzingers2.

I’m a Lilly – And You’re Probably One Too: All Women Face Gender Discrimination

I’m a woman director who’s been working in Hollywood for nearly 3 decades. I was compelled to bring Lilly Ledbetter’s story to the big screen because her David-and-Goliath battles with an entrenched, American corporation resonated for me politically, professionally, and personally. The truth is that, while Lilly’s life and mine may seem worlds apart, we are both female workers in male-dominated industries — and gender discrimination hurts the same everywhere.

This guest post written by Rachel Feldman appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Alabama factory worker or Hollywood film director – all women face gender discrimination everywhere.

Lilly Ledbetter was an Alabama tire factory supervisor who learned, after enduring her job for nearly 20 years, that she was earning only half of what men doing the same work received. She sustained myriad harassments during this time while her sole focus was lifting her family into the middle class. Lilly fought through 3 legal battles, winning the first case at $3.8 million dollars — even though the state cap was significantly lower. However, she never saw a penny of this victory, as she lost the appeal, and also the subsequent judgment in the United States Supreme Court.

In that decision, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, a rare occurrence. The Justice felt that the court had made a mistake and entreated Lilly to lead the charge for change. Lilly and her husband, Charles, took the Justice’s words to heart and embarked upon another journey, the road toward activism. Lilly transformed from an aggrieved employee into an advocate on behalf of all women. After many years of lobbying Congress, Lilly became the “face” of Fair Pay when President Obama signed “The 2008 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act” as his first piece of legislation.

I’m a woman director who’s been working in Hollywood for nearly 3 decades. I was compelled to bring Lilly’s story to the big screen because her David-and-Goliath battles with an entrenched, American corporation resonated for me politically, professionally, and personally. The truth is that, while Lilly’s life and mine may seem worlds apart, we are both female workers in male-dominated industries — and gender discrimination hurts the same everywhere. I’m a Lilly. And if your career has ever suffered because of gender discrimination – then you’re a Lilly too.

I first became aware of Lilly, like most folks did, as I watched her on television at the 2007 Democratic Convention. I was mesmerized by her strength and inspired hearing this about how this dealt woman dealt with the terrible consequences of gender injustice in her life. I was heartened by the momentum of her activism, drawn to investigate her story on a personal level.

I soon developed a warm rapport with Lilly and her team: her attorney Jon Goldfarb, and the woman with whom Lilly co-wrote her biography, Lanier Scott Isom. I optioned her story to write and direct a film about her ongoing conflicts with narrow-minded factory workers, powerful capitalists, and the United States government itself. It’s been 8 years since that time and I’m delighted to say that I’m close to seeing this dream become a reality; but the story of getting here has been fraught with continued challenges, many of which are gender related.

***
I’m not a famous director. You don’t know my name and you probably have not seen my work. But I am a director who has paid my dues and knows my craft. I’ve done all the so-called “right” things. I have a Master’s degree in directing from a top film school. I’ve made numerous short films that have won prestigious awards and have garnered coveted grants. I’ve worked in the industry in a variety of positions: as an actor, a storyboard artist, a screenwriter, a branded webisode creator — and ultimately directed over 60 hours of Emmy-nominated television and long-form movies – all while simultaneously raising two children. I’ve also taught directing in the Masters program of one of the most famous film schools in the world, chaired the Directors Guild of America Women’s Steering Committee, and currently mentor hundreds of female directors from a variety of organizations.

While this chronology may seem impressive to the uninitiated, the reality is that my career has had huge gaps of unemployment; times when my family has suffered without health insurance and has gone to sleep with the anxiety of not knowing how we’d pay our bills. Being a woman director in Hollywood is far from glamorous.

For many years, even after I’d already directed a great deal of television, producers would say things to me like, “We already had a woman director this season.” Or, “Our cast and/or crew don’t like women directors.” And while I rarely encounter such overt discrimination now, there is still much unconscious bias that persists.

Lilly Ledbetter used the courts and, eventually, the law to bring her issue to light. We women directors may be able to do the same. In the past year, the ACLU and EEOC have affirmed the presence of institutional bias in Hollywood and are investigating the proper methods to rectify the imbalance. Although I believe these actions have led to an increased awareness and activism throughout our industry, there are ongoing, vestigial practices that must change if gender equity ever has a chance.

On my journey to getting Ledbetter made, I’ve had many lovely surprises. The screenplay, co-written with Adam Prince, won “The Athena List,” the Black List competition for scripts featuring female protagonists, run by Melissa Silverstein at the Athena Film Festival. I recently was awarded the “New York Women In Film & Television Ravenal Foundation Grant” for the project, a grant in support of directors over the age of 40. I’ve also received notes from dozens of producers who are fans of the project, urging me on and applauding my efforts, but acknowledging that getting a film like mine made would require Herculean powers.

One of the reasons that films with female leads are tough to get made is that financing is driven by foreign sales which necessitates a superstar to lead your film. While there are many dubious male actors from the ranks of action films who, despite their advanced years, still can drive foreign sales, in the opinion of foreign sales agents, unless you are one of the handful of megawatt female superstars, women do not drive foreign sales. I’m not an expert in international finance and I don’t pretend to understand the intricacies of this particular equation, but I’ve been listening and learning long enough to understand that there’s a double standard regarding the value of talent based on gender – and that this is an important default mechanism that must be challenged for the sake of the female actors, filmmakers, and certainly the culture of girls and women around the world.

Despite my resume, I’m often called a “first time director.” First time perhaps in that I have never before directed a film that plays in theatres, but with the many high-level, broadcast television series and long form movie credits over the course of a 25-year career, “first time director” is disrespectful at best. All this is — simply another excuse based on fear. Where is the value for the passion I have for this story, the unrelenting tenacity I have to tell it, and the decades of experiences that have led to a maturity and confidence of vision? And why is there a double standard when a male director can leap from making a single indie project to a huge studio tentpole? WTF?

Last year, I met with a producer who refused to consider me to direct my project because she didn’t believe she could finance a film with a female director. When I argued this point with her, she finally relented that perhaps she could get the film made with the woman who had just directed a musical, her first film by the way, that grossed over $70M that weekend. That discussion clarified for me that the producer’s reluctance was not at all about my ability to direct a great film; it was solely about my lack of celebrity. I believe that this culture of celebrity has become a dangerous cover for gender discrimination. Now it seems to be okay to hire a woman director, as long as she’s already a known commodity.

This is a dangerous slippery slope that we must be vigilant in confronting. At the Oscars recently, the president of the DGA was asked to name 5 women directors and he was proud to name the top directors already on most people’s lips. But in my opinion he should have redirected that reporter, as we must all try to change the conversation, to keep pushing forward the idea that there are thousands of accomplished directors ready to work and that our industry need only to look slightly deeper than the headlines.

Our industry’s love of a sure thing affects women who direct television as well. ABC is a network that tries to do the right thing. Every year they produce an event in conjunction with the DGA to introduce their executives to female directors. Sounds great, right? However, the criteria used to select the invited directors eliminates anyone who has not directed an episode of broadcast television within the past two years! In other words, the very population who needs this kind of support are excluded. Women who are actively directing don’t have trouble getting hired, they have agents and are already on approved lists. But women directors with experience who may be out of the loop for a while are shut out. It’s understandable that swift statistical change will look good, but real progress will only be made when the pipeline expands, not when the mission for gender equity is fulfilled by the same handful of directors.

I do sense change and I am heartened by our thespian colleagues who are speaking up for women behind the camera and signing on to our films. We will gain momentum through this sisterhood. At this very moment, I am searching for my own actor/collaborator with whom I can bring the remarkable character of Lilly Ledbetter to life. Like Lilly, I fight every day to advance our film, and I advocate for women directors like me who have powerful stories to tell, bursting with talent. I urge all of us to keep illuminating injustice wherever we go and to lift up other women. I’m a LILLY, are you?

Rachel Feldman is a director and writer currently in development with LEDBETTER, a suspense thriller about Fair Pay activist Lilly Ledbetter. She recently won the Writers Guild of America – Drama Queens Award for Best Spec Pilot for KINKS. You can learn more about her work at www.rachelfeldman.com and follow her on Twitter @womencallaction.