ALL POSTS
Julianne Moore’s ‘Still Alice’ to Receive Oscar-Qualifying Run (Plus Bonus Clip)
With four nominations and no wins yet, Julianne Moore might finally deserve her due at the next Academy Awards ceremony. The vehicle that’ll get here? Not the Hollywood-skewering showbiz satire...
CineCause Launches New Mentorship and Networking Initiative for Female Filmmakers
Producer Gina Belafonte, Killer Films chief Christine Vachon, and writer-director-actress Jocelyn Towne will be among the headliners at the inaugural Fueling Female Filmmakers (F3) event, a new...
Women Playwrights Make Up Only 33% of the Most-Produced Plays of the Past Decade
American Theatre has released its annual list of the top ten most-produced plays, and while the 2013–2014 season boasted a commendable 50–50 split between male and female writers, a look at the...
Guest Post: What is Queer Film Culture’s Past and Present?
Queer film culture has a longhistory, which directly links queer cinema, with its specific aesthetics andpolitics, with the film festival as a community experience. The oldest LGBT/Q film festival...
Women Directors Comprise Majority of San Francisco Film Society Grant Finalists
The San Francisco Film Society has announced the 14 finalists who will be competing for a $300,000 grant from the SFFS and the Kenneth Rainn Foundation. One or more narrative films from the Bay...
Digital Bolex Grant for Women Cinematographers Now Receiving Applications
Cinematography is one of the film industry’s least equal fields. In the last five years, women accounted for just 3% of all cinematographers among the 250 top-grossing films. In what might be the...
Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘Eden’ to Be Released Next Spring
French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s fourth feature, Eden, has been a staple this year at major festivals like TIFF and NYFF. And now the 20-year electronica epic has found a distributor in Broad...
Has the London Theatre Community Found a Solution to Gender Inequality?
Earlier this week, the theatre community in across the UK came together to discuss the problem of gender inequity on its stages. The numbers are just as bad over on that side of the Atlantic as they...
‘Key & Peele’s’ Lady Problem (And the Perils of Loving Comedy While Female)
Julie Delpy to Start Shooting Her Sixth Film Next Month
Fresh off her Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nod for Before Midnight (along with Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke), Julie Delpy is set to start shooting her sixth feature next month. Delpy will...
Trailer Watch: A Rebellious Sprite Faces Marriage or Death in Studio Ghibli’s ‘The Tale of the Princess Kaguya’
When the divine Princess Kaguya took earthly form after being born inside a lotus flower, she probably wanted something more out of mortal existence than a marriage conundrum. She doesn’t...
Women Directors Dominate the Competition at Abu Dhabi Film Festival
Seventy percent of the works in competition at the 2014 Abu Dhabi Film Festival (October 23 — November 1) will be directed by women. The ADFF will only showcase shorts (along with a Truffaut...
DGA Celebrates Women Directors, But What’s the Next Move?
The DGA hosted an event last Saturday night to celebrate the six women who created the Women’s Steering Committee 35 years ago. The 600-seat theatre was packed, with impassioned cheering and...
Powerhouse Female Producers Join Forces to Launch New Company
Big-league UK producers Alison Owen (Saving Mr. Banks, The Giver, HBO’s Temple Grandin) and Debra Hayward (Les Miserables, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Atonement) have teamed up to form a new...
The Big O: Lead or Supporting Actress? Depends on Which Category is Likeliest to Hit Gold
As of today, Patricia Arquette stands as the favorite to win a supporting-actress Oscar for her 12-years-in-the-making portrait of devoted motherhood in Boyhood. That is, if you believe the expert...
Guest Post: Pioneering Women DIrectors, Then and Now
This past Saturday night, the Directors Guild of America celebratedthe accomplishments of the Pioneering Women Directors of the DGA. Susan Bay, NellCox, Joelle Dobrow, Dolores Ferraro, Victoria...
Things I Learned from the ‘Selma’ Sneak
On Saturday night, Ava DuVernay brought a short clip of her upcoming film Selma (opening Christmas Day) to the Urbanworld Film Festival in NYC. (As Ava put it: “Jason Reitman takes his films to...
Julie Taymor’s ‘The Lion King’ Becomes Highest-Grossing Work of Any Media in Entertainment History
The stage version of The Lion King has a lot of things going for it: a universal story, sing-a-long songs, childhood nostalgia for the animated movie, and relatively affordable tickets. But it’s...
Seeking Our Story: Living Comedy with Elaine May’s ‘The Heartbreak Kid’
Elaine May traveled and told stories on the Yiddish theater circuit evenbefore she was born. In 1932, Jack and Ida Berlin welcomed baby Elaine inPhiladelphia, PA. After Jack’s untimely passing in...
The World Doesn’t See Lydia Diamond As a Female Playwright
The dearth of women in the theater world is well documented. While the three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama this year were all women, not a single female playwright appeared on the Tony...
Eva Longoria Producing Drama About Latino Texas Politician Brothers
Since the end of Desperate Housewives, Eva Longoria has reinvented herself as a producer, especially of projects with Latino leads. Longoria’s biggest producing hit is Lifetime’s...
Geena Davis Institute New Research Shows That Girls and Women Are Missing Onscreen and Behind the Scenes Worldwide
From my latest Forbes post on the Geena Davis Institute’s new findings on the state of film worldwide: Girls and women are missing. There are 2.24 male characters for every female character. Only...
Supergirl Coming to TV
Superheroes haven’t just taken over the multiplex, but the Huluplex too. Debuting this fall are Fox’s Gotham and NBC’s Constantine, which will join CW’s The Flash (in its first season) and...
Watch: Emma Watson Explains Why Feminism is the Opposite of Man-Hating in UN Speech
It’s no secret that the word “feminism” has a PR problem. Just this spring, Shailene Woodley echoed the (misinformed) sentiments of a lot of girls and women when she declared that she wasn’t...
Angelina Jolie Announces Her Fourth Directing Project
Three months ahead of the release of Unbroken, her second film as director, Angelina Jolie has signaled that she’s serious about her mid-career turn as a filmmaker by announcing her fourth...
Trailer Exclusive: Vessel Directed by Diana Whitten
One of the fundamental tenets that I hold true is that women’s rights are human rights, and included in those rights is the right to a safe and legal abortion should a woman want or need one. When...
Liz Heldens to Write New Show from Carol Mendelsohn
Few industries have been as utterly transformed in the past decade like those of journalism and the media. Former CSI showrunner Carol Mendelsohn is spinning that anxiety about the changing job...
Alessandra Stanley or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Marginalize Black Women
I thought about whether or not I wanted to dignify the verbal sludge that is Alessandra Stanley’s article about How To Get Away With Murder (and Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal) showrunner Shonda...
Weekly Update for September 19: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Tracks Based on a true story, Tracks is the first film (Wild will be the second) to come out this fall about a woman who takes a solitary journey for reflection and...
Barbra Streisand is About to Make History: Six Decades of Being #1
Barbra Streisand is about to make history. In all likelihood, her new album, Partners, will debut at №1 on the Billboard 200 chart next week. What is remarkable about this achievement is that, if...
Trailer Watch: Amy Adams Fights for Artistic Recognition in ‘Big Eyes’
The trailer has finally arrived for Tim Burton’s Big Eyes, starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz as Margaret and Walter Keane, the couple behind the paintings, postcards, and prints of big-eyed...
Toronto Deals: Anne Fontaine’s ‘Gemma Bovery’ and Lone Scherfig’s ‘Riot Club’ Find US Distribution
Two women-directed films that played at the Toronto International Film Festival have found US distributors. TIFF 2014 was host to two films that rhymed with “Emma Bovary” — Sophie...
The Stagnation of Opportunities for Women on TV
From my latest Forbes post on how the progress for women writers and especially directors on the small screen has stalled: Women are stuck, and that is even more clearly illustrated in the data...
Guest Post: Why I Couldn’t Turn Down Starz’s Filmmaking Experiment ‘The Chair’
When I was offered the role of filmmaker/guinea pig on Chris Moore’s The Chair, a filmmaking experiment-turned-docu-series currently airing on Starz, it was a no brainer. The premise of The Chair...
Trailer Watch: ‘E-Team’ Profiles Human-Rights Investigators in Action
In places like Syria and Libya, where human-rights abuses were/are rampant, someone has to compile, analyze, and collect evidence of crimes against humanity in the midst of chaos to tell the world...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Mami Sunada — ‘The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness’
Mami Sunada was born in Tokyoand studied documentary filmmaking at Keio University. She broke into film by assisting director Hirokazu Kore-eda on StillWalking and Air Doll. She also wrote and...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Boo Ji-Young — ‘Cart’
Boo Ji-Young attended the Korean Academy of Film Arts. She directed the feature film Sisters on the Road (2009), as well as four shorts: Spark (1997), His Humming (2000), A Drop of Clear Salty...
Roz Chast, Jane Smiley, Marilynne Robinson Among National Book Award Nominees
Roz Chast, a cartoonist for the New Yorker, has become the first graphic memoirst to be nominated for the National Book Award. Unfortunately, her account of her elderly parents’ difficult few...
‘Madam Secretary’ is Her Own Woman
When early news of the CBS series Madam Secretary came out, word was the title role was a fictionalized version of Hillary Clinton. (Meanwhile, NBC was said to be developing a Hillary-centric...
Katie Couric and Stephanie Soechtig to Take on Gun Violence in New Doc
After tackling America’s obesity epidemic in the “sugar is the new tobacco” documentary Fed Up, Katie Couric and director Stephanie Soechtig are reteaming to take a hard look at another...
Alison Bechdel Wins MacArthur “Genius” Prize, Working on Third Graphic Memoir
Already a household name in feminist, queer, and film circles, Alison Bechdel was named one of the 21 recipients of this year’s MacArthur “Genius Grant.” Bechdel was in an Italian castle at...
Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer Riff on Cereal in New ‘Broad City’ Teaser
We would never have pegged Broad City’s Abbi and Ilana as morning people, so this first teaser for the second season of the loose, loopy Comedy Central show is a bit of a surprise. The NYC...
Lesley Arfin and Judd Apatow to Create Netflix Show for Gillian Jacobs
When Judd Apatow announced earlier this year that he was collaborating with Amy Schumer on a big-screen vehicle for the brassy Comedy Central star, we celebrated his mid-career shift into mentoring...
Leslie Bennetts to Write Joan Rivers Biography
In the days since her death, Joan Rivers has been publicly eulogized by friends and protégés like Kathy Bates, Louis C.K., and Howard Stern. Now the trailblazing comedienne is set to receive a...
Book Excerpt: How Nicole Holofcener Got Her Debut Feature, ‘Walking and Talking,’ Made
The following is an excerpt from independent film producer Ted Hope’s new book Hope for Film, which was published August 5, 2014. Nicole Holofcener alwaysmade it clear to me that she would not...
Fort Bliss Director Claudia Myers on Women in the Military and the Difficulties of Balancing Motherhood and Film
There are many films about the harrowing experiences of war, but not nearly enough about women soldiers — especially women with families. Returning home after serving her tour in Afghanistan...
Women Created Only 20% of TV Shows Last Season
The current narrative in the media zeitgeist is that TV is so much better for women than film. Well, it might seem so on the surface, because you see more women on our TV screens, but when you drill...
Hong Kong and Latvia Submit Films by Women Directors for Foreign-Language Oscar Consideration
Two works from female filmmakers have been chosen as their countries’ selections for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Hong Kong has submitted Ann Hui’s The Golden Era as its pick. The...
Katniss Everdeen Tries to Save the World in Mockingjay Part 1 Trailer
There’s no denying that I am excited for the Mockingjay film. After this past summer where we saw so few females onscreen, and so few in strong roles, I am psyched for the next installment of the...
DGA Women’s Steering Committee to Celebrate 35th Anniversary on September 20
Since its founding in 1979, the DGA’s Women’s Steering Committee has called attention to the limited opportunities female filmmakers faced — and continue to face — in the film...
Guest Post: ‘Srugim’ Brings Orthodox Jewish Women’s Feminist Struggles to the Small Screen
The Israeli series Srugim, which ran from 2008 to 2011, was a watershed moment for how women areportrayed on Israeli television. The show raised the bar particularly with its sympathetic depiction...