Women's Film Festivals & #WomenInFilm Databases: A Handbook

By Marian Evans, Barbara Ann O'Leary, Beti Ellerson and Luísa Pécora

Essential handbook for women-identified filmmakers, in all their diversity, who want to find and connnect with their audiences. And for everyone who loves those fillmmakers and wants to watch their movies, in real life or virtually.   

 

Comprehensive, global list of over 160 women's film festivals: Africa, Asia, Canada & the United States, Central and South America, Europe, Oceania and specialist all-year streaming sites. Links to each festival and its social media, and notes its associated activities like educational programmes, conversations with filmmakers and its publications. Describes each festival's Covid status. Also lists databases that support and promote women and non-binary filmmakers. Contextualised in Introductions to each section and in Afterword.

 

If you love the diverse female gaze, women's art and imaginations, community and women's lived experience, this is for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spiral
• Release date: Nov 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9780473581619

Book preview

Part One

WOMEN’S FILM FESTIVALS

INTRODUCTION

Background

Women’s film festivals and specialist organizations that distribute women’s films have been around for a long time, like Women Make Movies, an extraordinary resource if you want to create a festival. It will be 50 in 2022.

Some festivals have come and gone. Others, like Festival International de Films de Femmes (Paris, France), Festival di Cinema e Donne Firenze (Florence, Italy) are in their fifth decade. Women Make Waves (Taichung, Taiwan), St John’s International Women’s Film Festival (Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada), Cineffable (also Paris) are in their fourth. The Seoul International Women’s Film Festival (Seoul, Korea), Sguardi Altrove Film Festival (Milan, Italy) Uçan Süpürge International Women’s Film Festival/ Flying Broom International Women’s Film Festival (Ankara, Turkey) are in their third.

Visionary filmmaker and entrepreneur Ava DuVernay has often spoken about ‘building our own house and having our own door’ and the festivals and resources in this handbook do just this for people who love women’s cinema. They’re vital to the development and wellbeing of women’s filmmaking communities and they attract and grow eager and informed audiences.

Until Covid, I was keen to encourage women’s film festival tourism. But for now, as many festivals become virtual or hybrid, I delight in new opportunities to participate in festivals I could never hope to visit. Without having to travel beyond my sofa.

Many films screened at the virtual festivals are geoblocked and available only to people living in the festival’s locality - the festivals cannot afford to buy the rights to make the films more widely available. But often associated Q&As, discussions and workshops are accessible to all. And they’re often inspiring.

The Context: Women Filmmakers Struggle

There’s now broader awareness of the complex equity issues facing women filmmakers, of gender fluidity and of women’s diversity. More actions that reflect commitments to inclusion for all.

But although their working conditions have improved a little, in many places, women and nonbinary filmmakers almost always find it more difficult than men to find resources to do their work effectively and be paid fairly. It’s usually even more difficult for those who are also of colour, are indigenous, disabled, queer, poor; and those who have caring responsibilities. And, when we do make films, we will probably struggle to exhibit and distribute them effectively.

In her magnificent book about women in film, The Wrong Kind of Women (2020), Naomi McDougall Jones cites Deb Verhoeven’s research, done in 2016. It showed that, globally, women directed only 16% of all feature films distributed in any way at all. Women directed only 2% of all the films released in theaters. That may not have changed much. And other opportunities to see women’s films are uneven, in contemporary film festivals and online.

Women-Directed Films in Contemporary Festivals

Women-directed films are now more often selected for film festivals. Thanks to The Collectif 50/50 many major festivals have agreed to work towards gender parity. Other festivals established in the last decade, like Aotearoa New Zealand’s Māoriland (Ōtaki), consistently select equal numbers of films directed by women and by men.

But there’s still work to do.

The Time’s Up Foundation and the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative studied representation in five major film festivals 2017-2019 (Berlin International Film Festival; Cannes Film Festival; Sundance Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; Venice International Film Festival) and found that 71% of the directors of selected narrative films were men; and 62% of all directors were white (but see the changes documented below, in the Afterword).

Pins available from Le Collectif 50/50

Online Platforms

Some general online platforms are incidental resources for women’s filmmaking, for self-curated festivals at home.

Kanopy is a free service through many libraries worldwide and last time I counted our local Kanopy has 655 directed-by-women films available.

MUBI has lists of films directed by women, but a limited selection available for screening.

A Netflix search for films ‘directed by women’ used to include films directed by men. But today – in Aotearoa New Zealand – my latest search shows 300 available that truly are women-directed. So that’s good(ish) news.

In contrast, when I searched ‘directed by women’ on Amazon it offered 948 movies. But many of them were ‘about’ women and directed by men. HBO shows no results for ‘directed by women’ or ‘directed by women movies’. I couldn’t search Disney+ without having a subscription.

In this overall context, the work of women’s film festivals is indispensable.

What Women’s Film Festivals Do

Women’s film festival screenings and associated events provide rich experiences, for film practitioners and audiences.

Usually organized primarily by volunteers, they offer opportunities for filmmakers to share their work, their ideas and their skills with one another as well as audiences.

The festivals may showcase only local women filmmakers’ work, or include national and/or international films and filmmakers. They are immensely varied and may screen recent and/or historical work. They may focus on thematic and genre options like women in horror; women in sport; women leaders; queer women; or women and justice.

Some have a different theme each year. They may also screen only some kinds of films: animation;