News
September 30, 2011
Reading: Women in Film and Television: Breakfast at the Grind - by Marie-Claud Arnott
A Recent article by Marie-Claude Arnott looks at WIFTV's monthly networking breakfast and offers some of the insights shared by Katherine Monk at a recent event. Among those are:- In film industry circles, being a male filmmaker is not a questionable status, whereas it is for a woman.
- Women seem to make tactical errors leading to elusive careers.
- Success is all about optics: What you are projecting.
- Women need to own the entitlement of being as creative as men.
- TIFF saw a three-fold increase of female participants this year.
- Unlike previous years at TIFF, women entered more narratives than documentaries.
March 20, 2011
Reading: Where are the female film directors? By T'Cha Dunlevy, The Gazette March 10, 2011
The Montreal Gazette recently posted a news article about the latest findings published by the Réalisatrices Équitables Du Quebec . Despite making up nearly half the student population in university film departments, women direct a disproportionately small number of feature films. These findings reflect similar finds from 2008 which you can download here. A number of interesting finding are highlighted by Melissa Silverstein at Women And Hollywood, including the debunked myth that women don't support other women in the industry. In fact, “female producers submitted proposals for films directed by women 53 per cent of the time between 2004 and 2007; male producers submitted proposals for women’s films just 16 per cent of the time.” An English language translation of the finding's highlights can be downloaded by clicking this LINK.Finally, Please Adjust Your Set would like to congratulate Melissa Silverstein of Women And Hollywood on her move to the IndieWire blog network!
March, 2011
Reading: Katherine Monk, "In Praise of Stronger Women"
Katherine Monk, writing for The Vancouver Sun argues that the talent exists in Hollywood for films to be make with great leading women - even Jennifer Aniston, she points out, could turn out a solid performance if she wasn't cast simply as Adam Sandler's side-kick! She may be no Katherine Hepburn (Aniston) but the trouble is not with a lack of talent, but with a lack of strong leading roles for women. "As the money gets bigger ... the desire to push boundaries declines, [as do...] the number of female decision-makers." Read the entire article here:
February, 2011 - PleaseAdjustYourSet.com Award (new this year) - Rina Fraticelli.
Established in 1996, the Spotlight Awards bring together the BC Film community to celebrate the outstanding achievements of BC women in screen-based media. This year, WIFTV will be honouring the 2011 award winners at the Opening Night Feature Screening & Reception of the 6th Annual Vancouver Women in Film Festival, at 7:00 pm on Friday, March 4th, 2011. This year Please Adjust your Set is proud to announce a new award, the PleaseAdjustYourSet.com Award. This award honours a person for advocacy in the promotion of gender equity in film, television or screen-based media. Rina Fraticelli receives this award for spearheading the groundbreaking international conference SEXMONEYMEDIA in Vancouver in 2010.
Inspired by the studies produced by the BC Institute for Film Professionals, Rina created Women in View, a national association of media professionals whose goal is the achievement of greater diversity and balance in Canadian media, from the standpoint of employment equity, creative authority and gender representation. In October 2010, Women in View collaborated with WIFTV and Simon Fraser University's Centre for the Policy Studies on Culture and Communities to produce this international gathering of leaders from across the media spectrum with the goal of engendering a dynamic and equitable media landscape for the 21st century.
Rina has a wealth of experience in Canadian arts. She has produced a rich catalogue of award-winning documentaries and arts films including the Genie award-winning Fiction and Other Truths. She was Executive Producer of Studio D, the NFB’s ground-breaking women’s studio where she oversaw the production of such stellar works as Five Feminist Minutes, Forbidden Love, The Company of Strangers, and the creation of New Initiatives In Film, an innovative programme providing training and production opportunities to women from diverse communities. From 2002-2007 she was executive producer of the Pacific and Yukon Studio of the NFB. “I’m very honoured by this award and thank PleaseAdjustYourSet.com and WIFTV for creating awareness of advocacy issues in screen based media,” says Fraticelli.
Other women being honoured at this year's Spotlight Awards include:
To purchase tickets for this event, click here.
To read more about these awards, click;here.
To download the press release for this event, click here.
January, 2011 - Miriam O’Reilly has won her employment tribunal case against the BBC on the grounds of ageism and discrimination – but not sexism.
O'Reilly, 53, took the BBC to an employment tribunal claiming age and sex discrimination after she was dropped from the 23-year-old show, along with 3 other female presenters also in their 40s and 50s.To read the entire story, click here.
December, 2010 - Spotlight Awards 2011 CALL FOR NOMINATIONS
Women and Film in Television Vancouver invites you to submit your nominations for the 2011 Spotlight Awards. Established in 1996, the Spotlight Awards bring together the BC Film community to celebrate annually the outstanding achievements of BC women in screen-based media. This year, we will be honouring our winners at the Opening Night Reception of the 6th Annual Vancouver Women in Film Festival, March 4th 2011. To learn more about the awards, click HERE. To Download the nomination form, click HERE
December 2010
Vancouver, BC, Canada - December 3, 2010.By Siobhan Devlin for Please Adjust Your Set. Recently, the 25th Annual Gemini Awards (the Canadian equivalent of the Emmys), which honours the best in Canadian television in Program, Performance, and Craft categories, concluded its celebration with a black-tie Broadcast Gala at Toronto’s historic Winter Garden Theatre. 19 awards were presented during the televised event hosted by Cory Monteith of Glee fame, including those for Best Comedy Program or Series and Best Dramatic Series. Over the course of several award events, a total of 107 Geminis were awarded.
One of the mandates of Please Adjust Your Set is to share information that affects women in the Television and Film industry in Canada, so we were curious to take a closer look at the gender breakdown within the craft categories at this Silver Anniversary awards ceremony. How far have women come in gaining gender equity in the the Canadian television industry in the quarter century since the Gemini Awards were first established?
The results were pretty disappointing but not really surprising based on some of the stats we've been tracking this year. In general what we're finding is that rather than gaining ground, women in the industry have actually lost some foot-holds over the past few years. As we move into the second decade of the 21st century, it's critical to both recognize our achievements, and note where more work needs to be done to advance the issue of gender equity.
For this survey we looked exclusively at the gender breakdown within the Craft Category which includes awards like Best Photography, Best Writing, and Best Direction. We looked at these numbers when the nominees were announced, and again after all the winners were confirmed. The reason we look at these numbers specifically is because they reflect the overall gender equity within the industry off screen.
In total, there were 45 Geminis awarded in the different categories that fall under the Craft heading. Out of those 45 different awards, women won in only 10 out of 45 categories, accounting for just 22% of the awards. Interestingly, only 5 of the awards (or 11%) had no male winner. Because there are sometimes multiple winners within a sub-category (such as two directors on the same film) the final percentage of female winners within the craft category at this years Gemini Awards was only 18.75%.
On the heals of the Kathryn Bigelow Oscar win, I wanted to look more closely at the Best Achievement in Direction category: How are women directors faring in Canada? Out of the 13 awards given out in the Director category, 13.3% of the winners were female, while 86.7% were male. Put another way, out of 13 Best Director awards given out at the Gemini Awards this year, 11 had no female winner, while 100% of them had a male winner.
The number sound bad, what what's the overall implication?
The facts are that while women represent about 40% of film students in Canada, they represent only 32% of participants in the film and television industry labour force. In a study conducted of various funding agencies in Canada from 2002-2007, only 10% of the Canadian Television Fund budget was granted to women.One of the popular arguments made to justify inequity in the industry, that "women work less", can be refuted by a wide range of stats, but one that I find interesting is that of 182 respondents, 69 per cent of women reported having to supplement their film career by taking other work. Clearly women don't work less in the film and television industry because they lack a work ethic! 69% of women continue to invest in their film career despite the fact that it doesn't provide a sustainable income. I think that's pretty remarkable.
Please Adjust Your Set sends it's congratulations to all the winners at this year's Gemini Awards for their tremendous achievements, particularly to the women who have overcome challenges to achieve this honor.
- To review all the stats on the Gemini Award nominations, click here.