Male directors still reign supreme at New Zealand International Film Festival
If you're heading along to the New Zealand International Film Festival over the coming weeks, chances are the movie you are watching was directed by a bloke.
In a post #MeToo, Time's Up world, less than a third of films playing across the country in the 2018 festival programme had women at the helm.
And for Equal Employment Opportunities and Women's Rights Commissioner Dr Jackie Blue, the lack of female directors both here and overseas isn't due to a lack of talent, nor is it accidental.
Rather, it's yet another example of unconscious bias against supporting women to leadership roles in business and the creative industry.
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The Human Rights Commission's recent report, Tracking Equality in the Workplace, states the number of women in senior business roles actually declined in the past two years, rather than improved.
"To reverse this trend and have as many women as men in the director's chair...there needs to be a shift in culture," Dr Blue says.
"We need a conscious bias and special measures to ensure women are equally represented in decision-making roles at all levels of society. We should also ensure a career pathway for female directors – aspiring film directors not only need good role models but access to education and vocational training."
Targeting targets
Just how to achieve gender parity in the film industry, and whether targets or quotas are the answer, is the subject of a global discussion.
The Cannes Film Festival is considered the most prestigious film festival in the world. But of the 1770 directors who have proudly walked down the red carpet throughout its 71 year history, only 82 of them have been women - a woeful 4.6 per cent.
Compared to that, NZIFF director Bill Gosden says New Zealand's 30 per cent is a remarkable number.
And while he believes diversity is in the festival's DNA, there are no plans to increase those numbers. He prefers the programme to form organically. The festival, he says, supports women's work by "showing them".
"This has been a really good year. You have to look at everything in the overall context of the difficulties that women face in the movie industry, which I think are familiar to all of us, but all things considered it's been a very strong year for women who make movies and it's quite well-represented in the film festival," he says.
Over the last three years, women-directed films featuring in the NZIFF programme have steadily increased.
In 2017, they made up 27 per cent of the programme. The year before that, the number sat at just 22 per cent.
Women in Film and Television executive director Patricia Watson says it isn't so easy to increase the number of female directors featuring in film festivals.
"NZIFF have a charter to represent the best of world cinema, not to represent women or achieve gender equality," she says
"If they can achieve that, because of the quality of work that's out there - that's fantastic. We need more women to come through for films to be directed by women. But in some countries, you're looking at figures of eight per cent of films directed by women. It's actually quite hard to achieve parity until there is more product coming through."
Watson believes change is coming. With the help of the New Zealand Film Commission, she hopes its target of having 50 per cent of women filmmakers in the professional development area by 2021 is enough time to see a cultural shift.
It is a lack of confidence, NZ filmmaker Jackie van Beek believes, that holds many emerging female directors back.
"Women feel quite confident more in the writing roles, but in terms of standing up and leading a large group of what usually is predominantly men, I think it is confronting to emerging directors," she says.
Van Beek has just come off an Australian tour promoting her latest film The Breaker Upperers, co-directed with Madeleine Sami. Their film was selected to open the Sydney Film Festival.
During interviews, van Beek found many emerging female filmmakers and writers were keen to seek advice on how to get ahead in the game.
"Madeleine and I always say, try to stay confident in yourself and your own potential. Gather a supportive and talented team around you that are supporting you in a leadership role and don't sit by waiting to feel confident - or don't sit by waiting to be encouraged by money - especially for younger younger emerging filmmakers," she says.
"We've been saying to start small, build your confidence, you don't need to apply to big funding bodies and be rejected, just start small, self-fund things and gain your confidence like this and the money will come."
In Europe, collective 5050x2020 was formed out of France this year to promote gender equality in the film industry.
They're working with the French Ministry of Culture to bring an even split between men and women working behind the camera in France.
As part of its international campaign, co-founder Delphyne Besse has contacted various film organisations in New Zealand hoping they will liaise with the NZIFF to encourage the same target.
While she admits that the NZIFF can't achieve real change on its own, she hopes groups could rally the government to look into implementing targets here in New Zealand.
Watson agrees that if targets were in place in the larger festivals, New Zealand would be more likely host a more gender-diverse film festival. Currently, the pool of female-made films just isn't large enough.
"I am not aware of many women who actually want to be (included in the programme) just because they're women," she says.
"They want to be rightfully included because of the quality of their work so, yes, you might be able to achieve the numbers by programming anything, but that's not necessarily going to play well for women or the audience."
Festival director Gosden says he won't support a policy that insists 50 per cent of a film festival's programme must be directed by women.
"I think films have to be selected according to their merits and to be turning down strong films simply because they were directed by men does not seem to me like a particularly good idea," he says.
"I think the idea of equal opportunity for men and women to make films is an admirable policy and one that I definitely would applaud the Film Commission's efforts in that direction.
"But asking a film festival to programme film festivals equally by men and women is sort of like trying to compel an audience (that) for every film they see directed by a man, (they have) to go and see a film directed by a woman."
Not just our problem
Filmmaker Gaylene Preston released her most recent film, My Year With Helen, in the NZIFF last year. For her, the problems lie with distribution. Stories with guns and violence are more likely to be distributed outside the festival because that's where, the distributors believe, the money lies.
"As a filmmaker having made my first feature film in 1984 (Mr Wrong), I have had a front row seat watching the international distribution industry get more and more boycentric and bing, bang, bong," she says.
"This has trained up a global audience with an appetite for loud shocking violent films while the more quiet, innovative work gets paid scant attention. Giving the girl the gun doesn't do the trick, in my opinion."
Director Debra Granik is in New Zealand with the NZIFF promoting her latest film Leave No Trace, starring Kiwi actor Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie. She shares similar frustrations to Preston.
Originally, films directed by men tended to show violence, and those films performed well with audiences.
"For whatever reason, homo sapiens are creatures of pattern, so once we see something explode, a big skyscraper exploding and big shootouts and lots of automatic weapons, well, that sells. Let's just make a whole lot more of those, let's call it a franchise."
Granik says part of the Times Up movement, founded this year alongside the #MeToo campaign, was to call out habitual attitudes and ways of thinking.
"What happened to the other stories that there are to tell? What about the stories of everyday life where you can't save someone with a gun?"
Granik recalls a meeting she had with a company that wanted to work with her in the production of one of her films. When one of the male bosses excitedly handed her a list of the directors his company had worked with, there were no female names.
"I just said, 'Excuse me, why am I here? You don't seem to work with women. I don't know if you're allergic to them, or afraid of them, you don't like them, but something on this list tells me that clearly empirically, you do not work with women'," she says.
Change for the good
This year the NZFC is inviting submissions for funding for films with a woman director and at least one other woman in a key creative role to apply for 125 Fund, in light of the 125th anniversary of women's suffrage in New Zealand.
The commission proposes to invest up to $1.25 million into up to two feature films.
Last year two $50,000 scholarships were awarded to actress Rachel House and writer Briar Grace-Smith under a NZFC scholarship made in memory of Ramai Hayward, NZ's first Māori filmmaker, camerawoman, and scriptwriter.
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