Guest Post by Lawren Desai
My son was still in diapers when I founded an art house cinema. I wrote my business plan during nap time and showed up to construction with a stroller. This was in 2010: the Great Recession was lingering, 35mm projection was still a distributed format, and smartphones were more novelty than norm.
I was entering the film exhibition world blindly. I just wanted to have a place to show the kind of films I liked in my hometown. I really didn’t have any entrepreneurial experience, just an MBA and the confidence that only delivering a baby can generate.
This was going to be the first indie art house cinema in our community. On the one hand, it meant there was absolutely no guidebook to follow. On the other, there were no men who had charted this course before me who I would be measured against.
Juggling a toddler and a full-time job, out of necessity, I had to create a work environment that was flexible and supportive to women from the get-go. From the very beginning, I decided women would be encouraged to work to their potential, gain new skills, and to be themselves. It was going to be a place where no one ever told a woman she couldn’t run projection or negotiate with a vendor, or that men were the only ones who could read a blueprint or understand a financial statement.
When we opened in January 2010, the first film we screened was “An Education,” soon followed by “Fish Tank” and then “Winter’s Bone” that summer. That same year Kathryn Bigelow took home an Oscar, the first for a female director. Just a little naive about things, I’ll admit, I assumed women must have made significant gains since I’d last been around the industry back at the turn of the century when I’d interned, PA’d, and script read my way around Southern California. And in my neck of the woods, most of the small businesses on my block were transitioning to predominantly women-owned and operated. It seemed like women were on the move.
Flash forward nine years and what we continue hear in the news is that not that much has changed for women, especially in Hollywood. You may have heard the stats: only 11 percent of the top 250 films in 2017 were directed by women, which is the same percentage as back in the year 2000.
In the art house theater world, we are making strides — or at least I feel like we know we need to, and are trying to do so. We don’t want to be represented by those statistics. Theaters like mine, spread all over the U.S., from big cities to small rural communities, are trying our best to offer audiences more diversity and gender representation in our programming. When women are given more opportunities behind the camera, we have more opportunities to screen their films. At my theater, a/perture cinema in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 23 percent of the new releases we screened in 2017 were directed by a woman, and so far in 2018 we are closing in on 30 percent
I’m not just programming these films because I’m a woman and it’s something I believe is important, which it certainly is; I’m playing these films because they are great cinema and deserve to find an audience. Women filmmakers are crafting films that are just as creative, technically proficient, and visionary as men, but from an underrepresented view and vantage point. They reflect the world we live in and embody diversity and change, which makes these films essential.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said — in one of the highest grossing documentaries of 2018, which so happens to be directed by women, Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s “RBG” — “real change, enduring change happens one step at a time.” I think we can shorten those steps with our wallets. Women make up more than 50 percent of the population. We have economic power and yes, we know there is a wage gap, but we can still go to the movies with our 80.5 cents per dollar. We can choose to spend money on films made by women, whether that’s a studio film or an art house film. All men aren’t ready to put us on an equal playing field, but let’s not wait.
In 2016, myself and a small group of passionate art house cinema exhibitors founded Art House Theater Day. Now in our third year, this September 23, art houses around the country will be screening special films to celebrate our theaters and our unique contribution to our local communities and the film industry. One of the films we’re set to screen is Raja Amari’s “Foreign Body,” the story of a young woman who arrives in France illegally, seeking refuge from Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution. Raja is a woman who has made an essential film — there are countless others, and they deserve to be seen. We should support women on-screen, behind the camera, and behind the projector every day.
Lawren Desai is founder of a/perture cinema and co-founder of Art House Theater Day. Follow her on Instagram @lawrendesai.
