Progress in all sizes

Plastered across TIFF’s social media feeds in the lead-up to the festival has been the proclamation that this year a third of the films selected for the festival are directed (or codirected) by women. The campaign aims to aid women filmmakers through funding and workshops, promoting their films and drawing attention to inequality. While these initiatives are incredibly important, I can’t help but feel skeptical. With a history of cinema and festivals for and by men, self-congratulatory hashtags over what is still ultimately an inequality doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

If anything, it reminds me how easy it is to get lost in the politics of festival films. Wanting to see everything is in itself a difficulty; forming a schedule based around the identities of directors can be even harder. The desire to support marginalized filmmakers can feel at odds with seeing movies in which you’re actually interested.

Publicly announcing intentions to screen so many films by women could end up serving those eager to criticize a bad film by suggesting it was only selected because it was made by a woman. Of course, we can be comforted by the guarantee that bad films know no gender – and many men have already made films of low quality.

Perhaps it’s easy to resent a program like this because it makes the state of diversity in film – which is simply depressing – plainly obvious. It can be scary to think about equality in film and how it impacts enjoyment, but there’s no need to see it as something burdensome. As distasteful as it might seem at first glance, these types of interventions in festival programming are necessary. And while a third of the films is a meagre amount, it still represents progress.

At least TIFF is doing something to help even out the playing field. One can only hope that next year there will be an even greater percentage of films created by women. But as much as I want to be happy that a third of scheduled films are made by women, it is important to acknowledge that much more progress must be made. We need to overcome the systematic problems in cinema that lead to women being underrepresented. And we need to overcome where we are now, with unequal representation in film festivals still considered progress.

While certainly an important step, these initiatives are only a first step, upon which we must improve.