http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/23/AR2009102300194.html?sid=ST2009102204685

To earn her two Oscars, Hilary Swank went mano a mano with Clint Eastwood in a boxing ring and sucked face with Chloë Sevigny. But her toughest test yet might be this weekend, when box office numbers for “Amelia” come in. The historical drama, about the pioneering aviatrix Amelia Earhart, represents a major risk in Hollywood, where studio executives have been increasingly chary of making movies about strong women. If “Amelia” earns respectable receipts, chances are it will be dismissed as a lucky break. If it fails, it will be cited as yet more proof that strong female protagonists are box office poison.

Reached by telephone last week, Swank — who also executive produced “Amelia” — was optimistic. “I think things ebb and flow, and someone out there who crunches numbers probably affects that,” she said regarding studios’ reluctance to make films about strong women (“Amelia” was produced and distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, a subsidiary of Twentieth Century Fox). “Then I think art has to override it, and the numbers people say, ‘Oh right, that works.’ It comes in and out.”

Strong women, for now anyway, are out. Two years ago, when the Jodie Foster vigilante thriller “The Brave One” failed at the box office, industry blogger Nikki Finke reported that a Warner Brothers production executive announced to staffers that the studio would no longer produce movies featuring female leads. This past summer, actress and writer Nia Vardalos blogged on the Huffington Post that when she was pitching a project to a studio executive, he asked that she change the female lead to a man. Why? Because “women don’t go to movies,” he told her. “When I pointed out the box office successes of ‘Sex and The City,’ ‘Mamma Mia!,’ and ‘Obsessed,’ he called them ‘flukes,’ ” she wrote.

Will ‘Amelia’ fly?

On paper, at least, “Amelia” should be a surefire hit. The high-gloss portrait of 1930s pilot Earhart recalls such audience favorites as “Out of Africa” and “The English Patient” in its sense of epic romance and period glamour. Swank gets to flirt with two dashing leading men, Richard Gere and Ewan McGregor. And she plays an enduringly fascinating icon, a free spirit who vanished mysteriously in 1937, leaving behind a tantalizing myth that combined speed, adventure, proto-feminist brio and American optimism.

The only problem? No Manolo Blahniks! No Abba! No vampires!

Consider: It’s been nine years since Julia Roberts starred in “Erin Brockovich,” about a nervy legal assistant who wound up taking on corporate America. Nine years before that, Jodie Foster starred in “The Silence of the Lambs,” in which she played a quietly courageous FBI agent. Of the top 10 movies of 2009 so far, only one features a woman in a leading role: the romantic comedy “The Proposal,” starring Sandra Bullock. “Julie & Julia,” which is close to breaking the $100 million barrier, is the only hit film that features a “serious” female protagonist —  Julia Child, played by Meryl Streep.

In an era when women in movies fall along a spectrum defined by Hannah Montana and “Twilight” on one end and “Sex and the City” and “Mamma Mia!” on the other, where are the screen heroines of yesteryear, who could be strong, serious and sexy?

“Dramas are dead,” says producer Lynda Obst (“Contact,” “The Invention of Lying”). “Some of the greatest parts for women — the Academy Award parts for women — are often in dramas, and this is the worst time for dramas since I’ve been in the business for the last 10,000 years.” More than ever, Obst adds, the movie business is geared toward the young men who go to movies most frequently. “And by and large that’s a comedy audience and an action audience. To get a project greenlit now, studios are requiring more and more what we call ‘unaided awareness,’ which is where you get this addiction to toys and comics and old titles. And dramas don’t live there.”

To understand the situation of women in Hollywood right now, one need look no further than Drew Barrymore, whose career over the past year perfectly crystallizes the good-news/bad-news dichotomy. The ensemble romantic comedy she produced and starred in, “He’s Just Not That Into You,” was a hit. “Whip It,” the girl-centric action comedy that marked her feature directorial debut, was not — even though it put Barrymore in the company of a remarkable crop of female directors with movies out this year: Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion, Nora Ephron, Karyn Kusama, Lynn Shelton and Lone Scherfig (whose effervescent coming-of-age film, “An Education,” opens Friday), to name just a few.

But Barrymore also delivered a stunning dramatic screen performance in 2009. Not in a major motion picture, but on HBO, in “Grey Gardens” opposite Jessica Lange. “Dramas are still alive in television,” says Obst, “which is why we see some of our greatest actresses emigrating to TV, everyone from Mary-Louise Parker to Glenn Close to Holly Hunter.”

To cries of “I call sexism!” most insiders agree that it’s more complicated than that. “I don’t think it’s sexism,” says writer-director Rod Lurie, whose films “The Contender” and “Nothing but the Truth,” as well as the television series “Commander in Chief,” all featured strong female leads. “Because Hollywood will do whatever it takes to make money. They are not taking a principled stance against women. They just don’t see the audience as going there.

“I’ll tell you something,” Lurie continues. “When we were researching ‘Commander in Chief,’ which was about the first woman president, we found that men supported [the idea of] a woman for president more than women did. Women’s top priority was security, and they felt more comfortable with a man for that reason. Women are the predominant buyers of tickets at movies, but they don’t seem to support in any great strength going to see ‘The Brave One’ or ‘Duplicity’ or ‘Changeling.’ ” (The failure of “Duplicity,” the Julia Roberts caper comedy that came out earlier this year, is often mentioned as yet another death knell for meaty women’s roles.)

What women will go see, observers agree, are groups of women in comedies, a la “Sex and the City,” “Mamma Mia!” and “He’s Just Not That Into You.” (Each of them, it bears noting, was based on a popular TV show, musical and book.) “Women like going out in groups to watch women interacting in groups,” says Paul Dergarabedian, box office analyst for Hollywood.com. “And they are very loyal. If they discover something they like, they tell their friends about it. Women were social networking way before Facebook.”

And what what women like, at least for now, Dergarabedian says, are traditional narratives. “There’s no ‘Bourne Identity’ with a woman starring in it right now,” he says. “It’s almost as if in real life, women want to be empowered and in control, but on-screen they seem to like the old-fashioned damsel-in-distress, love-struck female.”

A changing biz

This state of affairs distresses Melissa Silverstein, who tracks women’s issues in the entertainment industry on her Web site Women & Hollywood. “One of the things making me nervous this fall is the box office of movies like ‘Jennifer’s Body’ and ‘Whip It,’ ” says Silverstein. “I call them ‘girl-power’ movies. They’re the movies I dream about for my feminist future. And the fact that people didn’t go to see those movies makes me want to weep.

“Figuring out how to reach women and young women is the challenge for this business. They don’t know how to do it well. Car companies have figured it out, yet Hollywood has not figured it out.”

One reason why we see fewer strong female leads these days is a changing business model, notes Silverstein. In the 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s — years when stars like Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, Sally Field and Goldie Hawn were making movies in a diverse number of genres — studios were not, as they are now, subsidiaries of multi-corporations, responsible for contributing to quarterly bottom lines. With economic pressures greater than ever, studios are looking for movies that are guaranteed to make $100 million their first weekend out. The result: More Paul Blarts, fewer Erin Brockoviches.

The upshot, Obst says, is that “it’s easier for male executives to get jobs now, because they want to develop male-oriented material. Girls don’t grow up reading comic books or playing video games, or with Transformer or G.I. Joe toys. So the material they’re looking for isn’t necessarily as familiar to female executives who read books, which is becoming practically a liability. That’s a real problem. That’s how it becomes systemic.”

For his part, Dergarabedian sees the recent trend as part of a cycle that will eventually shift. “Maybe someone hasn’t built the perfect beast yet,” he says. “Ultimately, everything comes down to the movie. If the movie’s good, it can cross over all kinds of lines and break all sorts of rules.” Obst concurs. “Are we ever going to see strong women again in movies? We might see them in thrillers. We might see them in an elegant horror movie like ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ or ‘Rosemary’s Baby.’ The movie just has to be a bang-out narrative with a star people want to see. But dramas? They’re on television.”

Meanwhile, Swank recently wrapped “Betty Anne Waters,” based on a true story of a woman who put herself through law school to exonerate her wrongfully accused brother. It’s a bona fide strong-woman drama, says producer Andrew Sugerman, in the tradition of “Erin Brockovich.” The film has yet to be picked up, but Sugerman is optimistic. “We have a distributor very interested,” he says.

This two day event will showcase the works of Asian women film makers in a range of genres – fiction, non-fiction, animation, television features. The term ”Asian” refers to origin – the film maker can be working in any part of the world.

The five Festivals held so far have always coincided with International Women’s Day. They were:

2005 EXPRESSIONS IN FREEDOM

2006 WOMEN, MEDIA AND SOCIETY : TRANSFORMATIONS

2007 REFLECTIONS : WOMEN IMAGING REALITIES

2008 INSIGHTS & ASPIRATIONS

2009 DIALOGUES IN DIVERSITY

Past editions of the IAWRT-INDIA Asian Women’s Film Festival have travelled to Kolkata and Ahmedabad. Screenings are also scheduled for later this year in Pune and Thiruvananthapuram.

The theme of the Festival in 2010 is BREAKING BOUNDARIES: SHARED SPACES. The selection of films will reflect how women (as film makers and/or as protagonists) negotiate, resist or document political, social, cultural, environmental, educational or economic issues.

While we will retain the interesting Q&A with the film makers after the screenings, this year’s Festival will include retrospectives, animation, student films from media schools from all over the world and videos from grassroots communities. The Festival will provide an intimate atmosphere for interaction enriched with interesting side events.

The best three student films will receive certificates of merit.

The International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT) is a non–profit professional organization of women working in electronic and allied media. It is a non-government organization (NGO), in consultative status with United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). IAWRT collaborates with media organizations and organizes conferences, projects and other allied activities.
We take this opportunity to invite film makers to send in their entries by 20th Dec 2009.

Jai Chandiram, Festival Director, jaichandiram@ yahoo.co. in /
iawrtindiafestival@ gmail.com
Mobile (0091) 9811277004

Reena Mohan, Program Coordinator, iawrtindiafestival@ gmail.com

http://www.womensmediacenter.com/ex/101309.html

Moviemaking styles may vary between Hollywood and Bollywood, but women working in the Indian commercial film industry have as difficult a time as their counterparts in the United States getting good roles and investment in their films. Director Zoya Akhtar takes a satiric look in Luck by Chance.
A sixty-something bald man lectures a class of aspiring male and female actors on what is required to be a “hero” in Indian commercial films. “It is very difficult to be a hero in Hindi films because he not only acts, he also sings, dances, and plays serious, funny and action-oriented roles,” said the acting teacher. “It takes a lot of nerve to be a hero in Indian films.”
But, when a female student asks about the prerequisites to be a “heroine” in Indian commercial films, the teacher rambles incoherent sentences, indicating he is caught off-guard by the unexpected query.
This is a scene from an Indian film, Luck by Chance, a satire of Bollywood that tells the story of a female protagonist who—despite a more rigorous struggle alongside her male-counterpart—does not make it big in the industry. By contrast, the hero of the film receives phenomenal commercial success.
Does such gender discrimination in the Indian film industry exist for real?
Zoya Akhtar, the director of Luck By Chance, knows from the inside of the industry that the answer is a simple “yes.”
Parallel cinema aside, there has been a dearth of women-oriented scripts in Indian commercial films. The role of female protagonists in Indian movies is to support the male characters.
Confirming Aristotle’s view of art as an imitation of life, gender discrimination in the industry does indeed reflect the bias that exists in Indian society. For instance, the gender ratio in India is heavily skewed in the favor of males (1.12 male/female). Thus, Indian moviegoers are also mostly men—roughly between the ages of 15 and 34 years. These moviegoers, according to an all-India survey by a research organization, enjoy mindless comedies. Such thinking dominates cinematic expression in one of the world’s largest centers of film production.
This situation also formed the basis of the opening panel discussion at New York’s recent IVIEW Film Festival 2009, which explored gender and sexuality issues. Filmmakers and actors on the panel were asked to comment on the presentation of social issues through Indian films.
The Indian entertainment industry stands at $10 billion today and is expected to grow at 18 percent per annum compounded annually over the next two years. An average Indian spends approximately 4.6 percent of disposable income on movie watching in theaters. And because issue-based films are not a favorite with the masses, a producer opts for subjects with more appeal so that s/he can recuperate the huge investments involved in film production.
Even female filmmakers do not risk funding for their films by focusing on women-centric subjects. Zoya Akhtar, the filmmaker of Luck By Change, downplayed the importance of the female protagonist in her film. “The character could have been any,” said Akhtar at the festival panel. “The fact that she is a woman is a coincidence.”
But because the film ends up centering on the story of a woman, the director struggled for six years to make the film—apparently because numerous male actors turned down the costarring role. She had a difficult time despite her insider status in the industry as the daughter of renowned Indian scriptwriters and the sister of an accomplished film director, actor, producer and singer.
Akhtar is not the only filmmaker who has faced this problem. Maghna Gulzar is the daughter of another respected lyricist-writer-director Gulzar and the famous actress Rakhee. She told BBC in a 2002 interview that while she was making her debut film, it was an uphill task for her to cast for the male character’s role. She said, “every leading actor presumed” that she was “making a feminist film.”
However, the costar issue can work both ways, evidently. “I’ve always faced problems over signing up leading actresses,” said the male Indian film director, Onirban Dhar, to an Indian magazine. “This is because they are more interested in knowing which hero is opposite them.”
With the star system thus forcing directors to compete for commercial viability, who can be blamed for the absence of social issues in Indian commercial films?