“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.”
“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.”
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.”
Gina Prince-Bythewood
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.
Dylan McDermott
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.”
Debora Spar and Dylan McDermott
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.”
Melissa Silverstein and Kathryn Kolbert
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
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.
We live on a planet, populated, in near-equal parts, by males and females. We move about the world, where (in our country at least), the work-force is again, split right down the middle. We all come from families, where, at least for nine months of our existence, we were held within the experience of a woman. Our first connection to another human, a literal connection which formed and fed us, was with a woman. But, you just don’t see that. Once in the world, our art and culture belie that experience. The populations in TV, in film (maybe all arts and culture), tilts strangely in one direction. It is disorienting. Disorienting because it is a lie. I don’t think art is a place for lies. I think, it’s the place for truth-tellers. For whistleblowers.
This is a guest post by Carol Roscoe.
Last week, I was talking with some actors about the TV series we were currently binge-watching. One mentioned Orange is the New Black. (Full disclosure: I was the only one among us who hadn’t seen OITNB, yet.)
“Yeah, my girlfriend wanted me to watch it with her, but then I got totally into it.”
“You sound surprised by that,” I said.
“Totally,” he agreed. Before I could ask why, another actor at the table said, “My girlfriend is really into Orange but, eh. I was really put off by it.”
“What put you off?” I asked.
I was talking with a savvy actor-writer-director and was expecting something like: not believable, didn’t like the characters, didn’t like the writing. What he actually said took me by surprise. It was this:
“Well, the characters are all really fascinating. Compelling. Like, I want to know what happens to them and about where their stories will go and all. I mean each character is really interesting enough to get their own series.”
“But…”
“But, well, I just couldn’t identify with them. I mean, all the characters are women. You just don’t see that.”
Cast of Orange is the New Black
“No,” I said, “you don’t.”
“Right?” he continued, “I mean, imagine trying to watch a show where nobody reflected your experience.” (Oh, one more disclosure: I was the only woman at the table.)
“Because they are all in prison?” I asked, just in case I misunderstood him.
“No, because….you do know the premise of the show right? It’s all women.”
Pablo Shreiber and Kate Mulgrew
“I’d heard that.”
“That’s just really hard for me to connect to.”
“So it’s really disconcerting to see a story about so many people who, well, aren’t like you. I mean, gender-wise.”
“Yeah, exactly,” he said.
I nodded, trying to figure out exactly what kind of conversation I was interested in having.
“I have total compassion for you,” I said, “I know exactly what you mean.”
He looked doubtful, so I continued. I shared how my life had been plagued by the same experience. Everywhere were stories that focused on people of that other gender; books, TV, plays, movies seemed to hinge on the experience of people who, in fact, were not female. It was weird, I confessed, disorienting and disheartening. As an actor alone, that had a limiting effect on the number or roles available in a season, in theater or film. You could look it up, only 30 percent of speaking roles in film were female characters. In theater, especially classical theater, this disparity was even greater, at times male characters outnumbering females 14 to one.
“Our show’s different,” he said, proudly.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Out of five roles, one is female. We are achieving a 20 percent representation of half the world’s population.”
Graph courtesy of Econ Proph blog and the U.S. Census Bureau
“Look,” I added before he could explain how that was good, “I empathize with you. It can be a real challenge, seeing stories about people who aren’t like you. It can feel disconcerting, even marginalizing. Perhaps, though, and I can only suggest this based on my own experience, perhaps one might encounter the story as a human story, irrespective of gender. One might even investigate the difference or similarity between experiences. One might expand one’s awareness, one’s compassion, and get to experience what life is like for another person. There just might be value in that.”
He was silent for a while. Maybe he was wondering what kind of conversation he wanted to be having. After a moment he said, “Right.”
But, I was thinking about other things, like: why bother? Why be an actor? Why work that hard, for that little, in order to play a mind-boggling narrow range of roles? And for an audience made up of people who weren’t interested in anything they didn’t already know?
I got to thinking about my next project, the story of a whistleblower. In researching people who have come forward with state or corporate secrets I was struck by by how many were driven by a sense of fairness to break their code of silence. Each saw injustice, irresponsible and/or criminal acts occurring; each chose to step forward, risk their career (their lives) to act for the common good. For the whole of humanity. Not just a part of it.
We live on a planet, populated, in near-equal parts, by males and females. We move about the world, where (in our country at least), the work-force is again, split right down the middle. We all come from families, where, at least for nine months of our existence, we were held within the experience of a woman. Our first connection to another human, a literal connection which formed and fed us, was with a woman. But, you just don’t see that. Once in the world, our art and culture belie that experience. The populations in TV, in film (maybe all arts and culture), tilts strangely in one direction. It is disorienting. Disorienting because it is a lie. I don’t think art is a place for lies. I think, it’s the place for truth-tellers. For whistleblowers.
I empathize with that young man’s distress. But, I’m not interested in lying to him. Or to our audiences. How do we move from misrepresentation–no, how do we move from lying about the world to telling the truth? To breaking the silence about the injustice, disregard and dehumanizing aspects of our culture? Of our industry? How do we continue that conversation when the punishment for whistleblowers is so clear?
I’d be lying if I said I have the answer. Well, other than the obvious one. Keep having the conversation. Keep doing the work. Choose meaningful work. Create meaningful work. Work with as little misrepresentation as possible and hope that it will connect to someone. Hope that the work reaches someone across the gulf of whatever divide and offers a tiny glimpse of what life is like on the other side.
Morgan Freeman, Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption
Carol Roscoe makes her home in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest where she teaches, acts, directs, and writes. Film work includes West of Redemption, Gamers:Dorkness Rising, Gamers: Hands of Fate, The Dark Horse, and The Whole Truth, and others. Her latest film, If There’s a Hell Below, will be released early next year. She has appeared on stages in Seattle, London, New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Tucson and Pheonix.
