Variety: Director-writer Dee Rees, whose period piece “Mudbound” hits Netflix on Nov. 17, has had to fight for all of her projects to be made and financed.
Speaking at the Women in Entertainment Summit on Wednesday, Rees shared her journey to making her first films “Pariah” in 2011 to “Bessie” in 2015 to now, describing how along the way, she made sure to hire women and expand the pipeline of female and minority filmmakers.
2 comments:
While none of this is particularly groundbreaking, I find that applying numbers to the discrepancy between males and females onscreen does pack more of a punch than the ambiguous and non-concrete assertions that frequently arise when discussing issues such as these. In using numbers and percentages, the Geena Davis Institute is supplying us with a firm metric against which we can measure "success", and a quantitative goal to aim for.
I do wonder why the sexual assault allegations that have been all over the news were only mentioned briefly, in passing at the summit. Perhaps the summit leaders wanted the emphasis of the summit to remain on what was occurring in terms of representation on screen. If this is the case then I feel that their thinking is short sighted; what is occurring off screen - in the real world - is just as, if not more important than what is place onscreen. Yes, what appears onscreen informs every aspect of our culture, but until we fix what is wrong behind the scenes, how can we ever hope to right what audiences are seeing from their seats?
I completely agree with Amanda that the use of numbers and statistics tends to have a larger impact on people than just speaking about it. I find that that is true for me personally as well, I tend to respond better to hard facts than opinions but the bigger issue here is that we don't trust women the way that we trust men. If men came out and said that something was a problem or that there was an inequality we would listen because as a culture we are conditioned to listen when men speak. However, when women speak out in spades about a problem nothing is even acknowledged until we have cold hard facts. There is a larger problem here that we neglect to acknowledge not only about the problems that we have but about the way that we hear the problems. Culturally women are not heard. It feels a little wrong to make a blanket statement like that but it is absolutely the truth. When I open my mouth in a meeting I am fighting to be heard, and really listened to in the way that men are just by existing. This article is great because it does present good facts but the facts should be backing up our trust of women, not the only reason we are listening.
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