Significant move on International Women’s Day.
AB Wire
In a significant move which will ensure more women join the film industry, apart from empowering women, the National Film Board of Canada (NFBC) commissioner Claude Joli-Coeur announced that the organization will ensure that in future half of its films will be directed by women and half of its production budgets will be spent on films directed by women.
The NFB is close enough to gender parity already that the target – which is to be achieved over three years and was announced at the Vancouver International Women in Film Festival – should not be hard to meet. But the initiative, following on a similar pledge last year from Bell Media’s BravoFACT and BravoFACTUAL production funds for short films and short docs, may serve as a goad to the Canadian industry, which, like Hollywood, is led almost exclusively by men, reported The Globe and Mail.
Figures from Women in View, a Canadian group that studies the issue, show that in a sample of 91 feature films made in Canada in 2013-14, only 17 per cent of directors, 22 per cent of writers and 12 per cent of cinematographers were women. Comparable U.S. figures are lower still.
The Globe and Mail report said if the NFB’s enforced parity seems like a reasonable solution, it is because the larger industry is so heavily male that women filmmakers have begun calling for radical change, believing that the shortage of female directors behind the camera and the absence of strong female stories on screen are linked.
One initiative, launched by a group of Canadian and American filmmakers and actresses at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, calls on producers to ensure that 80 per cent of their movies pass the so-called Bechdel test, a requirement that a film contain at least one scene where two women talk about something other than a man.
Read the full story: