The “sausage party” flash mob at the Aacta awards last week, protesting gender inequity in the Australian film industry, was a wake-up call. Hilarious in a larrikin Aussie way – but a sobering spotlight on an endemic and deepening problem.
As one of the few women directors to win an award this year, I clicked my support of the Sausage-ettes in quiet solidarity. But when I read that two of the protesters – Louise Wadley and Megan Riakos – had directed feature films with successful independent theatrical releases, which had nonetheless been rejected for consideration at Australia’s major film and television awards, I felt compelled to speak out.
I am not bitter. I am proud of the fact that my third Aacta, after 20 years in the game, confirms I am not invisible. I feel blessed to be working in an industry in which Screen Australia, the Australian Directors Guild, Screen NSW and others are working hard to tackle the continuing imbalance between male and female directors.
But the fact that between 2009 and 2014, only 15% of film directors in Australia were women is too extreme not to address.
My personal experiences reflect what Deakin Professor Deb Verhoven and close film-maker colleagues have also observed: there is a powerful club of predominantly male tastemakers in this country who continue to back films for mainstream production, exhibition and distribution on the assumption that their tastes reflect the majority of Australians. With some commendable and fearless exceptions, they are wrong.
Unless these gatekeepers acknowledge, alongside the screen agencies, that women and equally overlooked minorities have diverse and different tastes, and that women and minority directors are capable of making films that speak to, and work for, these audiences, nothing will change.
In 2013, I made a feature documentary called Aim High in Creation!, in which a bunch of Aussie actors produce a North Korean propaganda film to stop a gas mine in Sydney. I secured a media visa inside North Korea’s secretive propaganda film industry and filmed Pyongyang’s top movie stars and directors; in fact, I was the first westerner to do so. On the back of my commercially successful feature Forbidden Lie$ – and with far greater access than Vice’s Shane Smith, whose own take on North Korean cinema had gone viral – I assumed a mainstream distribution deal was in the bag.
No such luck. Even before we’d shot a frame, no major distributor would touch it. North Korea is not a “niche” subject and neither is fracking: both attract millions of clicks daily. My media pass inside North Korea was a buzzworthy scoop, as were our box-office-friendly stars, Susan Prior and Peter O’Brien. Aim High! is no masterpiece but it’s also no turkey: it went on to win an Aacta nomination, an Atom award and a six-figure sale to Netflix US. Having just screened it in America, I can confirm it is still a crowd-pleaser. Women and men alike came up afterwards with recognition and validation in their eyes, telling me what they’d seen was unique, revelatory and entertaining.
Had a powerful Australian distributor such as Madman picked up Aim High! when we pitched it, I am confident it would have held its own against Australian features screening at the time. I can only assume I was denied mainstream exhibition because as a 40+ woman director playing a Morgan Spurlock-style frontman in my film, I’d broken too many locks on the gender straitjacket.
Not since Ruby Wax in the 90s has there been an acceptable “box” for provocative female film-makers working in the style of Spurlock and Louis Theroux. If I’d grown a beard and pitched the same film as a cool, 30-something dude – aka Shane Smith – I’m pretty sure Aim High! would have secured that crucial stamp of blokey approval and gone on to reach the audiences it deserved.
My latest feature, the Aacta–winning Pauline Hanson: Please Explain!, has just been rejected by the Vision Splendid outback film festival, whose draft plans to promote its 2017 pro-female focus included a poster of a sexy cowgirl. Suggesting, not without humour, that I enjoy my award in decorous silence, programmer Dr Gregory Dolgopolov (a friend and cherished sparring partner) explained his audiences “won’t pay” to see Please Explain, despite the fact it is by a woman, about a woman, and speaks directly to issues confronting rural women – one of the festival’s core demographics, and one I deliberately made the film to reach. To be fair, by mid-2017, Hanson may be less relevant. And Vision Splendid has since confirmed that more than 35% of the directors in its new lineup will be women, with at least 60% meeting the gender-parity benchmark set by the Bechdel_test.
I share these stories not because I am unique or disadvantaged: I am hugely lucky to still be making films. I share them because I suspect they will resonate with any female or minority director trying to reach an audience. We know instinctively that the films we make speak to the audiences we intend them for – but securing the mainstream infrastructure and endorsement required to get our films seen by these audiences is all too often elusive.
It is time that commercial tastemakers acknowledge, as they did in the slightly more egalitarian 90s (when women directors sat at 20%, not 15%), that film is a subjective medium. The stories that work for ethnic minorities, for GLBTI people, for seniors and for 50.12% of Australia’s population – women – are different to the stories that work for Anglo men. They are also different to the stories that work for teenaged Anglo men, who, for some mysterious reason, remain the demographic which many middle-aged Hollywood executives (and by default, many in Australia) cling to as the holy grail: get Junior off PlayStation 4 and into the cinema and you’ve somehow got it made.
According to distributors I’ve dealt with, and as powerhouse producer Sue Maslin confirms, the overwhelming majority of Australian punters who still go to the cinema are, in fact, women. So let’s cater to these women properly. Let’s put women in key gatekeeper positions in distribution, programming, commissioning and exhibition. Let’s acknowledge that the decisions about what women and minorities want to watch should not only be made by men.
And let us call out the myth that continues to be disseminated in investment boardrooms, on review shows and at festivals across the country – that films directed by women, or about women, are “marginal” and “don’t work” – for what it is: a myth.
Exhibit it, and they will come. The idea that people won’t pay to see films directed by women is false. The idea that these films aren’t good enough is another fallacy: the female directing students I have taught at AFTRS, UTS and Macquarie over the past decade have been as talented, driven and visionary as their male colleagues – often more so.
The same applies to my female director peers, all of whom have worked doubly hard to achieve mainstream recognition, including Samantha Lang, Eva Orner, Shirley Barrett, Jen Peedom, Cate Shortland, Catherine Scott, Rachel Perkins, Rachel Ward, Catriona McKenzie, Jennifer Kent, Jocelyn Moorhouse and Gillian Armstrong – who recently pointed out that until as many mediocre women are out there directing films as mediocre men, we will not have true equality.
The idea that audiences are content with the kinds of Australian films on show in cinemas and festivals every year also doesn’t cut it. If I had a dollar for every time a woman, young or old, told me how repulsed she is by onscreen violence, how bored she is of the blokey Hollywood genres we’ve been slavishly aping for a decade now, how sick she is of endlessly recycled war epics and schlock crime comedies such as Kill Me Three Times (2014), which feature the gratuitous abuse of women as light-hearted entertainment, I could open my own cinema chain.
The Australian film industry, when it refuses to copy the latest UK and US formats, when it has the guts to back the unique stories that are evolving on its own soil and the film-makers who want to tell them, has always punched above its weight.
Alongside the legendary, male-helmed Strictly Ballroom, The Castle, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Rabbit Proof Fence, Eternity, Newsfront, Animal Kingdom, Ten Canoes, Balibo, Muriel’s Wedding and Mad Max is an equally luminous list of defiantly original films by women: The Piano. Bran Nue Dae. Proof. The Babadook. Chasing Asylum. Looking for Alibrandi. 52 Tuesdays. Head On. The Black Balloon. Look Both Ways. Japanese Story. Girl Asleep. My Brilliant Career. The Dressmaker.
Things are moving forward. Screen NSW has already announced that from 1 July 2017, 50% of all features they support will either be directed or written by women. At a networking event on Wednesday night, the CEO of Madman Entertainment, Paul Wiegard, announced they are now actively seeking out more films by women directors.
It is time to resurrect the courage, iconoclasm and vision that put the first Australian films on the world stage, and to give women and minority directors – of all ages – a permanent place at the table.