Kathryn Kolbert – Bitch Flicks

Rosie O’Donnell and Gina Prince-Bythewood Attend the Athena Film Festival

“The movies we screen here tend to be unfiltered,” Barnard President Debora Spar told me on the red carpet of the Athena Film Festival Saturday night. “They’re powerful. They’re different voices. And we just want to provide a platform to get those voices out there.”

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

The Athena Film Festival, co-founded by Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein, just ended its impressive fifth year last weekend, Feb. 5 through 8, and featured a strong slate of films, panels, documentaries and shorts focusing on female protagonists and filmmakers.

The film festival ended on a strong note with the screening of Difret, based on a true story about the abduction of a 14-year-old girl in an Ethiopian village kidnapped on her way home from school. She killed her captor after he raped and beat her, and the subsequent trial riveted the country and started a national conversation about child brides. The film, directed by Zereseney Berhane Mehari and produced by Mehret Mandefro, is executive produced by Angelina Jolie. It was Ethiopia’s submission for best film foreign Oscar and will be released in this country in March.

Gina Prince-Bythewood and Melissa Silverstein

But back to the awards ceremony Saturday night, where Olympus Has Fallen actor Dylan McDermott–the only man on the red carpet and a member of Barnard College Board of Trustees–told me he wished there were more female directors. He noted that he made a film directed by Jodie Foster–Home for the Holidays back in 1995–and that Joanne Woodward discovered him while he was doing a workshop and later mentored him and changed his life: “She was maybe the best director I ever worked with.” He added, “I find that women directors are very different from men. Their sensitivity and their vision are a lot different. The two best directors I worked with were women.”

Athena honoree, Beyond the Lights director Gina Prince-Bythewood, told me on the red carpet she was excited about being in the company of women whose work she held in high esteem. “That definitely got me on the plane out here from L.A. to the Athena Film Festival; I’ve heard so many great things about it. Amma Asante was honored last year and we’ve become good friends during this whole awards season. And just that it’s a festival focusing on women and the importance of female filmmakers,” she noted. “There is a difference between female and male filmmakers, and it’s really about the point of view and what we focus on with our female characters, so it’s a beautiful thing to be a part of it, and I hope that honestly I can see some cool films and be inspired as well.”

The filmmaker told me her next film will focus on female friendship and the way it changes over time. “It’s a little more comedic in tone” than her previous works, referencing Beyond the Lights, which was screened later that night at the festival to a packed audience, and at which the filmmaker participated in a lively Q&A. “I love finding young voices, people that have something to say and have chops, and I think that’s my responsibility as one that’s gotten through the door to reach back and help others as well.”

I asked the filmmaker her reaction to the Oscar nominations. “There were a number of people who should have been in the conversation,” she told me. “There were no people of color nominated in any of the acting categories. I mean David (Oyelowo) obviously should have been nominated. Gugu (Mbatha-Raw), who gave two phenomenal performances (Beyond the Lights and Belle) that were 180 degrees from each other; any other actress would have been exalted after that,” she said. “The problem is the drumbeat for her happened too late. It should have happened out of Toronto, but I’m excited for what’s next for her. I just hate that she’s not in the conversation right now.”

Rosie O’Donnell generated a frenzy of media attention on the red carpet as she made her first public appearance since she announced her marital split from Michelle Rounds and her exit from The View. She attended the premiere of her documentary, Rosie O’Donnell: A Heartfelt Stand Up, and later presented the President’s Visionary Award to HBO Documentary President Sheila Nevins.

O’Donnell told journalists on the red carpet her decision to leave the popular daytime talk show, which was just announced the previous day, was a decision she made with her doctor. She suffered a heart attack in 2014, and her doctor carefully monitored her health and told her after the holidays she had an uptick in numbers that indicated an increased risk of a heart attack, possibly as a result of stress from work and her personal life.

O’Donnell cautioned that all women should take care of their health but conceded she knew she was fortunate. “It’s not everyone who can take a break from working because of stress. It’s easy for me because I’m very rich, right? So I have a lot of help. So it’s easy for people like me to talk about it. I have somebody to watch the baby if I don’t feel like it, so I have a much easier life than 99.9 percent of women on the planet and I know that. But every woman needs to take their health seriously,” she said. “I ignored it, my own. I didn’t really participate in anything besides mammograms cause my mother died of breast cancer. I was so sure it would be breast cancer that got me, so when I had a heart attack I was stunned.”

A few days earlier Jodie Foster received the Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement Award and was supposed to attend the awards ceremony Saturday but had to jet back to L.A. for the Director’s Guild Awards in which she received two nominations.

During the Athena awards ceremony, via video, Foster, who has been an actress since she was a child, noted that, “There I was a young girl wanting to be a director and never seeing a female director’s face. I thought it was something I would never be allowed to do.” After her mother took her to a film festival of works by Italian director Lina Wertmuller, Foster said, “I came to realize that I could be a woman director if I wanted to because there was one out there, and that was a life-changing moment for me.”

The awards ceremony, which turned out to be a great party attended primarily by women, honored Gina Prince-Bythewood, producer Cathy Schulman, and HBO Documentary Films President Sheila Nevins.

O’Donnell, who presented Sheila Nevins with her award, noted that she fell in love with documentaries from the time she saw Grey Gardens. Then subsequently she’d see documentaries on HBO and every documentary she said, “has a name and it’s Sheila Nevins. Who is this witch I thought to myself?” O’Donnell met Nevins back in 1996, “when most of you Barnard students were in elementary school.”

O’Donnell said of Nevins, “She’s the woman I look up to the most in all of showbiz. Her heart is the biggest of anyone, and she’s got a Geiger counter for truth that’s never failed.” She added that she’s done six or seven documentaries with the HBO Documentary head that does the heavy lifting. “I give her a tremendous amount of credit, and I do very little work, and that’s how I like it.”

In a speech that was basically a stand-up comedy routine, O’Donnell also joked that she saw a woman who walked by wearing a grey hat, who caught her attention. The woman sat at a front table and O’Donnell cracked, “I saw you walking by and I’m like, ‘I don’t know who she is, but she might be my next wife.’” The audience roared. O’Donnell added the feeling might not be mutual and segued into a dig at Brian Williams: “Maybe that’s the problem in my relationships. I see someone and I make shit up like Brian Williams. I escaped on 9/11 from the Twin Towers. Oh No, I didn’t. I got mixed up. F—ing Lance Armstrong liar.”

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s emotional and heartfelt speech about her journey as a filmmaker was the evening’s highlight. She spoke about being adopted by white parents and her search for her birth mother that didn’t work out as hoped. She began her journey as a filmmaker with a rejection from film school but that didn’t deter her: “I wrote a letter to the head of the school telling her she made a mistake. She called me and said I’m in.”

Bythewood credited much of her success to other women who advised and mentored her, including A Different World producer Susan Fales Hill, who presented Bythewood with her award.

Sheila Nevins and Rosie O'Donnell — Sheila Nevins and Rosie O’Donnell

Bythewood said that people asked her all the time about discrimination against Black directors. “I’ve personally not been discriminated against,” she said. “What is discriminated against are my choices, which is to focus on women and especially on women of color, their goals and their love stories and it’s a tougher fight.” A fight made especially difficult because only 4 percent of directors are women in the Directors Guild, and in the Writers Guild it is only 10 percent, “which means that our images of females that young women … are seeing is from a male point of view, and I think that that’s frightening. I think that’s dangerous and just ignores our perspective. It’s not just what happened at the Oscars,” she said. “It’s the fact also that of the films nominated for best picture not one has a female protagonist and is from a female point of view, and that has got to change. I’m in that fight.”

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from The Artist. Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

The Athena Film Festival: Pushing the Conversation Forward

“We’ve been very lucky,” Silverstein says. “People have given their time to come in and share and teach, because we want to inspire people. The goal, really, is to just allow girls to dream and to believe that they could be directors and producers and writers, and for boys to see women can do this, too.” Silverstein hopes the message they take away is, “Everybody can be successful. It’s about talent. It shouldn’t be about your gender.”

This is a guest post by Josh Ralske.

The Athena Film Festival has grown more ambitious with each passing year, and this year, its fifth, is no different. The festival’s co-founders, Kathryn Kolbert of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College, and Artistic Director Melissa Silverstein of Indiewire‘s Women and Hollywood, spoke with us about this year’s festival and the scant progress women filmmakers have made in Hollywood in recent years.

This year’s festival has gotten unprecedented media attention for its premiere of Dan Chaykin’s Rosie O’Donnell: A Heartfelt Stand Up and for Lifetime Achievement honoree Jodie Foster. The opening night film, Kim Longinotto’s Dreamcatcher, is a documentary about Brenda Myers-Powell, a former prostitute from Chicago who has turned her life around and devoted herself to helping other women and girls break free of the cycle of abuse and exploitation.

“Once I saw Dreamcatcher and I saw this amazing woman, Brenda, I just knew that it was our movie,” Silverstein tells me. “It’s just one of these stories of people that are doing amazing work in their communities that you would never see. We’re thrilled to be able to share the story at its New York premiere.”

“We’re looking for films that are inspiring and that can demonstrate positive social change in ways that demonstrate women’s agency, their ability to make a difference,” Kolbert explains, “and I think Dreamcatcher really fulfills all of those goals. It’s a particularly inspiring film, and one in which individual women have worked together to make a difference in the lives of women who have lived as prostitutes and wanted to come out of that world.”

Still from Dreamcatcher — Still from *Dreamcatcher*

Dreamcatcher‘s themes fit perfectly with the festival’s unique goals and mission. “We’re a unique festival in that we tell the stories of women in leadership roles,” Kolbert says. “We show films that are made by both men and women, as long as women are the protagonists of the story.”

As the festival’s main programmer, Silverstein works at finding a balance between “movies that have been overlooked,” and “great stuff that might have been playing at their multiplex that they missed.”

Co-Founders of the Athena Film Festival, Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein

“What I try to do is curate a conversation,” she explains. “So I want to be able to have foreign movies, movies about women leaders in all different areas: in music, in science, in sports. It just shows the breadth and the depth of what women’s experiences are, and that’s what I try to do.”

While Silverstein is often frustrated by what studios will send to the small but steadily growing festival, sometimes she sees a film that she knows immediately they need to show. That was the case at the Berlinale last year, where she saw Athena’s Closing Night film, Difret, Ethiopian-born filmmaker Zeresenay Berhane Mehari’s drama of a teenage girl who responds violently when she’s abducted into marriage, and the bold young lawyer who takes her case. “The second I saw that movie, I knew that it had to play Athena,” Silverstein states, “and I have been like a rabid dog trying to get that movie.”

This year’s festival also includes some higher profile films, including the Centerpiece, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s underseen backstage drama, Beyond the Lights, featuring Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Minnie Driver, screening Saturday with the filmmaker, who’s receiving an award from the festival, in attendance. Filmmaker Gillian Robespierre will also be on hand for Satuday’s screening of her bluntly funny Obvious Child. The racially charged indie comedy Dear White People and Lukas Moodysson’s buoyant punk rock coming-of-age film We Are the Best! will also screen this weekend.

Then there’s actor-director-producer Foster’s well-deserved honor, the Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement Award. “Foster has been a quiet leader,” Silverstein says. “She’s been pushing the boundaries. She started to direct, as an actress before other actresses did that.” As an actor, Foster’s career highlights expanded Hollywood’s vision of the type of roles women could play. “The roles that she won the Academy Award for … The Accused was about gang rape, and that was in the late ’80s. That wasn’t a subject matter that was discussed at that time, and she really took that on,” Silverstein points out, “and then with Silence of the Lambs, she was really ahead of the curve. I think that’s what the Athena Film Festival wants to be, and Jodie embodies that.”

As a director, Foster hasn’t made a feature since 2011’s The Beaver, starring her embattled friend Mel Gibson. Like many talented women directors, she’s turned to the small screen, directing episodes of Netflix’s House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. She has a new feature in pre-production, Money Monster, starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts.

I asked both Kolbert and Silverstein if 2015’s successful films directed by women, including Obvious Child, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, and Amma Asante’s Belle, which opened the festival last year, offer cause for optimism. I pointed out that Michelle MacLaren had been hired to direct the upcoming DC Comics adaptation of Wonder Woman for Warner Bros., based on the strength of her television work, including several outstanding episodes of Breaking Bad. Neither was particularly sanguine about what these milestones mean for women in Hollywood as a whole.

“In the film industry, I don’t see a lot of progress,” Kolbert states, “except for the fact that now the paucity of women in film has become an issue that’s discussed.”

“The numbers have been really static for the last decade,” Silverstein points out. “We did a survey at Women and Hollywood from 2009 to 2013, and 5 percent of all the studio films were directed by women and only 10 percent of the indie films were directed by women.” She doesn’t mince words about the backward attitude those numbers reflect. “That’s just abysmal. We’re half the world. And we don’t get the opportunities. It’s not a lack of talent; it’s a lack of opportunities.”

Silverstein agrees with Kolbert that at least people are talking about the issues involved, as in the Academy’s recent snub of DuVernay, which Kolbert bluntly calls “a travesty.” As Silverstein sees it, “The progress has been in this robust, wonderful, inquisitive, and actually angry conversation about the lack of opportunities for women. I will be very happy when the numbers move to where the conversation is.”

The Athena Film Festival is playing a part in moving things along. That’s why it also includes a practical element, with Seed & Spark’s Emily Best giving a workshop on crowdfunding, and industry leaders Prince-Bythewood, Cathy Schulman, and Stephanie Laing providing Master Classes in their respective fields. “We’ve been very lucky,” Silverstein says. “People have given their time to come in and share and teach, because we want to inspire people. The goal, really, is to just allow girls to dream and to believe that they could be directors and producers and writers, and for boys to see women can do this, too.” Silverstein hopes the message they take away is, “Everybody can be successful. It’s about talent. It shouldn’t be about your gender.”

Kolbert makes a similar point. “My goal for the festival is that over the long term, when you think of leadership, you’re going to picture women,” she says, rejecting the traditional image of “a white guy with a little gray hair at his temples.” She sums up the Athena Film Festival’s mission nicely, quoting Marian Wright Edelman: “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

Josh Ralske is a freelance film writer based in New York. He has written for MovieMaker Magazine and All Movie Guide.

Interview with Athena Film Festival Co-Founders Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein

I had the wonderful opportunity to speak with Athena Film Festival co-founders Kathryn Kolbert, Constance Hess Williams Director, Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College, and Melissa Silverstein, Founder and Editor, Women and Hollywood. We discussed the upcoming festival, creating opportunities for female filmmakers, and the importance of seeing women leaders on-screen.

Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein via Women of Athena Pinterest — Co-Founders of the Athena Film Festival, Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein [Photo by: Kristina Bumphrey/Starpix]

The Athena Film Festival “is an engaging weekend of feature films, documentaries and shorts that highlight women’s leadership in real life and the fictional world.” I had the wonderful opportunity to speak with Athena Film Festival co-founders Kathryn Kolbert, Constance Hess Williams Director, Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College, and Melissa Silverstein, Founder and Editor, Women and Hollywood. We discussed the upcoming festival, creating opportunities for female filmmakers, and the importance of seeing women leaders on-screen.

1. Megan Kearns: Why did you both start the Athena Film Festival?

Kathryn Kolbert: The festival started after an event at Gloria’s Steinem house that Melissa had organized to honor Jane Campion. Both of us were very struck by hearing the same thing from all the filmmakers who were there about the difficulty of having movies with strong female courageous women characters in their films. I had just started at Barnard at the Athena Leadership Center and really felt like we needed to focus some of our attention on changing what I call the “blink” — what do you think of, what do you see when you think leader or when you’re asked what does a leader look like. Most people respond to that by thinking of a white man with gray hair at the temples. I think our view was we need to change that in the wider culture. And we need to level the playing field for women or men who want to tell stories about great women leaders. From there, the festival was born.

2. Megan Kearns : I’m sure you both love all of the films showing at Athena Film Fest? Which films or panels are you the most excited about? If people can only see one or two, which are must-see?

Melissa Silverstein: Firstly, we are very excited for three films that would highlight our opening film, our centerpiece film and our closing film. They’re all really different.

Belle directed by Amma Asante, tells the true story of a woman from history who helped basically bring down the slave trade in England. Decoding Annie Parker, also based on true events about two women, not connected to each other but separately, who came up with the idea that breast cancer is passed down from person to person. And then lastly, the documentary on Geraldine Ferraro [Geraldine Ferraro: Paving the Way]. Those are the pieces that we’re holding up as our “tent poles,” as they say. And Megan, you write about Hollywood, you know those “tent poles” are never about women, right? So all of our “tent poles” are about women at the Athena Film Festival.

And then there are amazing nuggets and conversations going on here that I don’t want people to miss. I want people to get a film, and then a panel, and then a film and then a panel. Some of those highlights are, especially for your audience, the “Bechdel Test 2.0,” which is really asking people to look beyond just the Bechdel Test and beyond representation to how do we create more substantive leading roles for women. Amplifying women’s voices — we’ll talk about and feature people working behind the scenes to get more women-friendly and women-centric content out there. Also, some leaders who are leading that charge.

[Filmmaker] Lexi Alexander is coming. She made a big hoopla with her piece on what it’s like to be a woman director. The woman is just like raw energy rolled up into…I don’t even know what she would be rolled up into. She’s going to explode like a cannon, I have a feeling. She’s got a lot of things to say and she’s not afraid to say it. And in a business where people are afraid to say the truth, I think this could be a very revealing conversation.

Kathryn Kolbert: I would highlight that I’m going to be talking with Leymah Gbowee who is the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Winner from Liberia. A woman whose story was told in the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell. And I think that helped to internationalize the unbelievable work that she did to create peace in a country that had been at war for many, many decades. If you’ve never had the opportunity to hear her, she’s just extraordinarily charismatic and interesting because she’s had a chance to visit with women all across the globe who are working for peace.

The second thing I think is really interesting across the festival is we have everything from a teenager sailing across the ocean alone [Maidentrip] to an animated film [Frozen], to women from all different countries around the world do many different kinds of things. I encourage people to go see more than one film, to come in and see 3 or 4, because that’s the story, that’s the subtext of what we’re doing that doesn’t get noticed until you’re seeing lots of things. The shorts are a really good example of that. Both shorts programs are great.

Melissa Silverstein: We curate a program that allows you to see all different kinds of women doing all different kinds of leadership. You have an opportunity to put together for yourself a vision of what you think films could be like and leadership could be like. I know the readers of Bitch Flicks like that vision and believe in that vision. By coming in and just sampling one or two things you get a little bit of it. But if you feel the breadth of it, you can understand the potential if we have more women’s stories in our culture.

3. Megan Kearns : How important do you think it is for people to see women in leadership roles on-screen?

Kathryn Kolbert: It’s incredibly important. Let me give you one piece of research that I think is extremely useful and telling in terms of what we’re trying to do here. A number of years ago in India, they passed what’s known as a reservations law which reserved a third of all town heads, the equivalent of mayors, around the country for women. They did that on a randomized basis so you could study what happened when women became mayors. Therefore, it couldn’t be attributed to something other than the gender of the women who ascended to these roles. Two things happened. One, the agendas of the women were different than the agendas of the men because they were listening more closely to both the men and women in the villages. The men’s agendas seemed to reflect the male leadership in the village. The women’s leadership reflected both the attitudes of male and female constituents. So the agendas changed.

But here’s the interesting piece that applies to our festival. What also changed was the aspirations of girls. When you had two women in a row who became mayors in their village, they believed and understood they could be a mayor themselves. That’s what this festival is all about. It’s how you inspire the next generation or the generation after that to ascend to leadership in whatever capacity they aspire to. Until they see people who are like them, in those roles, they won’t be able to do that as effectively.

Melissa Silverstein: So bringing in a person like Lexi Alexander, who has taken on — she doesn’t always think this is the thing she needs to do but she understands by putting this out there — she has taken on a responsibility. She wants this business to change. Not just for herself but for other women, the women who can’t get jobs and for the girls who want to see — as Kitty always says, “What do you think a leader looks like? The guy with gray hair at his temples.” When you ask girls, “What does a director look like?” They describe Steven Spielberg-like. We want girls to be able to dream, to see themselves as potential directors. That way we’ll have more stories about women, because we know the research shows that when you have more women behind the scenes, you have more stories about women.

4. Megan Kearns: There’s a panel on the Bechdel Test at Athena and last year 4 Swedish cinemas employed a Bechdel Test rating to indicate gender bias. How important do you think the Bechdel Test is?

Melissa Silverstein: I’m going to push back on you on the Bechdel Test. It’s not the beginning and it’s not the end. We get stuck in the fact that two women talking to each other about a man. Two women talking to each other about something other than a man is not enough. And should not be enough.

Kathryn Kolbert: If we put this in another context, it would be like saying because one Fortune 500 company has one woman on their board of directors, that the fight is over. It’s just beginning. It’s not really a fight. It’s an effort to bring parity in the world in a whole range of arenas. From my perspective, in terms of leadership, you only can change the world if women get beyond their gender and can contribute equally within any kind of organization or entity. And as long as they’re a minority, in any respect — whether it’s on-screen, behind the screen, directors, whatever role they’re playing — as long as they’re a minority, their gender is the only issue people are looking at them for, rather than the huge contributions they bring to the table. We believe in parity because it makes the product better.

5. Megan Kearns: Filmmaker Lexi Alexander wrote a stunning article at Women & Hollywood where she stated, “There is no lack of female directors…But there is a huge lack of people willing to give female directors opportunities.” How do you think the Athena Film Festival might help women directors obtain more opportunities?

Melissa Silverstein: What we’re trying to do with the Athena Film Festival is give women directors the opportunity to have their films at a first-class event and create conversations that show people — basically what we want to say is, it shouldn’t be a big deal to have six movies directed by women in a film festival. Yet, at all the film festivals I go to, it is always a big deal to see six movies by women. We want to create opportunities for them out there, they just don’t have the opportunity to be seen at this level. We want people to take them more seriously and we want people to understand that their work stands on its own. People in the film business need to look at this work a bit differently and to redefine what success is.

Kathryn Kolbert: We want to remember that men are allies in this as well. One thing that the Athena Film Festival has always stood for is it’s important what the story is, not necessarily the gender of the person who directed the film. While we do believe women directors need more opportunities, there’s no question about that, we also show movies by male directors who are telling stories of interesting, creative, courageous women because that needs to be part of the norm as well. The issue is not who made the film so much as what the film is contributing to the cultural conversation. From my perspective, in terms of how you change leadership, men and women need to work together to change what leadership looks like.

6. Megan Kearns: What are your thoughts on the Celluloid Ceiling’s Report that there hasn’t been progress for women in film in 16 years. How can we move past the “gender inertia” of film that Dr. Martha Lauzen talks about and achieve more diverse female representation in film?

Kathryn Kolbert: It’s not much different than any other major institutions in the country. Hollywood has despicable numbers but so do Fortune 500 companies, so do non-profits, so does the education sphere. All over the world, this is a problem, in terms of women and leadership roles. I think that the solutions are more complicated than any of us would like. It would be really nice if we could say there’s one thing that could be done and the problem is solved. It’s not that simple, nor do we believe that to be the case.

But I do think for Hollywood, there are two things that can make a significant difference. One is this myth that the major audience are 18- to 25-year-old guys. The blockbuster films are kind of geared toward that audience. In fact, women go to the movies, women are more likely to go to the movies when they’re not seeing blockbuster films for 18-year-old guys. That’s one really significant thing: the industry has to catch up to their own data.

Melissa Silverstein: It has to catch up to the rest of the country.

Kathryn Kolbert: The second thing is they have got to say this, they have got to admit that there is a problem. Until they do, it’s not going to change. To me, we need to call upon the leaders of the big studios to say openly that this is a problem, we’re going to address the problem, we’re going to work on the problem, and we’re going to quit ignoring it.

Melissa Silverstein: I agree. There has to be the will. Now there is no will. Now, Dr. Lauzen’s statistics, she’s been counting this for 16 years. I would venture to say that it’s been that bad for many more years than that. We just have those statistics for 16 years. This has been going on for decades.

But Hollywood is a business. These people’s jobs are to make money and the inertia comes from the fact that they continue to make money and they don’t see how bringing women into it will improve on their bottom line. They don’t see the need because their bottom line continues to grow. They’re contracting the amount of movies they’re releasing at the studios. As they contract, they make bigger “tent poles,” more boy-centric, more superhero-centric, more action-centric, more internationally-centric. All those issues lead into less and less opportunities for women.

Until somebody says, “I’m going to hire a woman to direct the next Marvel movie or the next Avengers movie, we’re going to have this conversation until we break through that glass ceiling. It’s got to happen at the top level.

7. Megan Kearns: Who are your favorite female filmmakers?

Melissa Silverstein: I’m a huge Lynn Shelton fan. I also feel like I’ve seen Nicole Holofcener’s body of work. There are many men you can say, “I’ve seen that person’s body of work.” There are not that many women where you can have the body of work and you can feel really connected to it. For me, I have that connection to Nicole Holofcener’s work. And I think one of my favorite movies of all time is Whale Rider. And Bend It Like Beckham.

The 4th Annual Athena Film Festival takes place February 6-9, 2014 at Barnard College in New York, NY. Learn more about this year’s lineup and buy tickets.