Why There Are So Many Filmmakers You Never Heard Of

An old friend of mine wrote me, telling me he went to a women’s film festival and he thought most of the shorts were “total crap.” “Where are all the good women filmmakers?”, he asked. I answered his question by stating the facts of the industry:

• Yes, there are amazing, fabulous women filmmakers. In fact, there are a lot of great filmmakers out there, women and men, and especially minority filmmakers, that you will never see anything from because the mainstream means of distribution –while changing significantly with digital technology and the internet– are still controlled by Hollywood’s version of the GOP.

On Women in Film from The New York Times

• Furthermore, you won’t see much women’s work because there is a myth believed by those who run the commerce of filmmaking that women and women’s stories are not money makers.

Cate Blanchett’s Oscars Speech

• The crap films you saw might be a result of the drastic reduction in the price of quality cinematic tools and their relative ease of use that has given license to many untalented or untrained people to call themselves filmmakers. But that is a fair price to pay for the democratization of filmmaking that is allowing many talented and visionary artists who were previously excluded from this expensive, exclusive medium, to create.

Lena Dunham (one of my personal heroes) talks about how the digital revolution enabled her to make films

• The ability to share and distribute video content digitally has eased the process of reproducing and sending video work to festivals. Many new film festivals have cropped up and have little in the way of screening standards. Established and new well-juried festivals are still an awesome way to see the best films that are otherwise often buried in the massive amounts of content being uploaded everyday.

20 Filmmakers to Watch For

• There simply are fewer women and minority filmmakers because they aren’t able to practice their craft — they aren’t hired, funded, and generally supported the way white men are. Sad, but true.

 

• And finally, making movies is really hard. It’s not an art form that is easy to practice –one short film can take months, thousands of dollars, and many people. All artists have to start somewhere. Sometimes when a film is bad, it’s just the filmmaker learning. Everyone needs a chance to practice and show their work. We learn more from our mistakes than from our successes.

 

 
You can read more about that here in my blog post about The Practice of Filmmaking