Heroines of Cinema - under 40 (Indiewire)
This week, the British Film Institute released statistics revealing that a mere 14 feature films were directed by women in the UK last year, compared to 164 by men. Meanwhile, of the 16 gala premieres just announced by this year’s Toronto film festival, none have female directors. The prejudices faced by women filmmakers - half of all film school graduates but only 5% of working Hollywood directors - have been well-documented. Those who do make it talk often of the depressing struggle they faced to get there, far longer on average than their male counterparts. It is equally common to hear of a female director whose difficulties in getting financed or produced stemmed from the personal subject matter of their work.
It would seem that both of these realities are informed by the depressing strain of misogyny which judges the perspective of a young woman to be somehow lesser. Greta Gerwig showed awareness of this when she said “| think that people get really angry when it's women doing it, to be totally honest. There's something that feels threatening about it and they have to be doing something other than being thoughtful. It has to be somehow an exercise in narcissism, because why else would you make anything about women?”.
Thanks to Matthew Hammett Knott of Indiewire
