The right direction
Toronto fest staying true to promise of working toward gender parity
Programmers for the Toronto International Film Festival are taking aim at their counterparts in Italy, sending a message regarding their treatment of female auteurs: Do better.
The shot across the bow comes with the 87-year-old Venice Film Festival under fire for programming just two female-directed films out of the 21 movies in its main competition lineup (Todd Phillips’ Joker picked up the festival’s coveted Golden Lion).
The Italian fest isn’t the only European giant that has been slow to make progress in programming work from women. France’s Cannes Film Festival this year offered only four of its 19 competition slots to women; a figure it happily trumpeted as significant progress.
Both Cannes and Venice offer the same defence: If the quality isn’t there, then they are not going to program second-rate movies just to meet a progressive quota and appear woke.
Venice director Alberto Barbera even went as far as to suggest that he would resign if he were forced to meet a gender quota, describing the concept as “offensive.”
“If I had found 50 per cent of films directed by women to include in competition, I would have done it, without the need to introduce quotas,” Barbera told Italian reporters at last month’s opening news conference. But senior staff at TIFF aren’t buying it.
“You’re not looking hard enough,” says Kiva Reardon, programmer for TIFF’S Contemporary World Cinema (CWC) section. She rejects Barbera’s notion that programming to quotas will reduce the quality of work shown at festivals.
“It suggests that the word quality or even best is objective, and not something that’s been created over a long time, through the way that the film cannon has been shaped — which predominantly has been by white, European men and their tastes,” she says.
This year, nearly half of TIFF’S 48 CWC titles are directed or co-directed by women, including France’s Mati Diop (Atlantics), Bangladesh’s Rubaiyat Hossain (Made in Bangladesh), Holland’s Halina Reijn (Instinct), Uzbekistan’s Sharipa Urazbayeva (Mariam) and Montreal’s Louise Archambault (And the Birds Rained Down).
Discussion around female representation in the film industry has increased considerably in the wake of the #Timesup and #Metoo movements, and TIFF artistic director and co-head Cameron Bailey last year signed an industry-led “50/50 by 2020” pledge. The agreement calls for greater transparency among film organizations, but stops short of demanding 50 per cent female representation across the festival.
Gender-parity in programming is hard to critique without the context of how many female-directed films are being submitted in the first place. Here, Venice offers a defence. Responding to its negative press, it launched an inaugural seminar on gender parity and inclusion, where it revealed that, out of the roughly 1,850 features submitted for selection, 23 per cent were directed by women. As such, the 25 per cent of female-directed films that it selected for its overall lineup is broadly in commensurate with submissions.
Barbera said it would take years for Venice to achieve gender parity. “If I’m to consider inclusion when selecting 60 titles from 1,800 entries, I should also select a certain number of films by black directors, a certain number by gay directors or other people discriminated for various reasons,” he told trade publication Screen Daily. “This won’t make for an exhibition of art, but for a civil rights festival.”
TIFF, meanwhile, tells Postmedia that about 32 per cent of its overall submissions (some 2,540 out of 7,925) came from women, making its 36 per cent female representation roughly in line with its submissions ratio.
And there’s the rub. Despite TIFF taking the moral high ground over its Venetian rival, both festivals still have a roughly 1:1 ratio between female-directed submissions and female-directed selections.
Perhaps TIFF would be better off highlighting its positive progress pursuing equality of opportunity, rather than equality in outcome, drawing attention to its excellent initiatives such as Share Her Journey, Rising Stars and Filmmaker Labs. In Toronto, at least, there is a will for change. And staff at the fest are optimistic that things are moving in the right direction.