by Augusta Palmer
Five years ago, I co-founded the St. Francis College Women’s Film Festival. Co-founder Magaly Colimon-Christopher and I wanted to create a place for our female students to shine and to expand opportunities for viewing experimental modes and global documentary on our campus. I have continued to run the festival and to insist on one point: the festival shows only work created by those who identify as women.
Though we consider and have sometimes accepted work in which a self-identified woman plays a major production role (which we define as co-director, producer, writer or editor), we always give precedence to films directed by women. I want audiences to see works made by women of all cultures and creeds to explode the idea that a “women’s films” fit into a stereotype or any unitary category of genre, style, or content.
Unconsciously, I have followed many of the Edit 10 directives in the way I run the festival. Putting it together is always a practice of creativity through financial and time constraints (#8), we have to know our resources in the local community, the college and beyond (#9), I cultivate my crew of interns by taking them to the Athena Film Festival and meeting regularly (#2), and work hard to get and keep all hands on deck (#6).
This year, the festival and I embark on a new experiment, as I will be running the 2020 Women’s Film Fest in collaboration with a class of 14 students instead with a staff of 4 interns. The Student 7 encourages us to “Create Courageously” (#6), and I’m excited to be testing new ground while continuing to know and draw on resources (#9) like Prof. Laura Vasquez, who has been running a student-led film festival, Reality Bytes, for years now. Like Judith Helfland, “I like to think of film festivals as laboratories… This means some things are going to stick, find synergy, and others won’t.” (261)
One thing I naively did not really expect to run into so consistently is elaborated in#10, “Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask On First” which warns that, “While implementing the Edit 10 can feel organic, you may find yourself engaged in difficult conversations about how best to create and collaborate across difference and how to address problems in representation”.
As more students and faculty became aware of the festival we felt a lot of thanks and gratitude for creating the event, but we also have consistently faced direct push back primarily from male students, who said “Why do we have a women’s film festival?” “You are excluding us from the festival.” “You are subjecting us to an unfair bias by creating a women’s film festival!” Whispered rumors of professors agreeing that the festival was engaged in discriminating against male students disturbed me even more.
Therefore, my interns and I created a series of responses to use to these arguments: “Our audience is always at least 50% male,” we replied.” “We’d love to see you create co-directed works with female students.” We also riffed on sayings from the world beyond media, molding them to meet our needs: “Women’s media is human media.” “You are welcome to start your own “Men’s Film Festival.”
The history of film festivals, we remind interlocutors, is almost entirely male, and largely white. Only in the last few years have some festivals begun to consider anything approaching parity in programming. Some still lean on the idea that festivals have always accept what they view as “the best” work, and women only make a small percentage of such works. I find this laughable, but, even if it’s taken at face value, wouldn’t we want to change those numbers?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously remarked, “There will be enough women on the Supreme Court when there are nine.” Following the notorious RBG, students and I tell those who question the idea of a women’s film festival that we run an event that actually has all of its films created by women.
We want to create a screening room of our own, but we are intent on sharing that room with people regardless of their gender expression. As always, we will return to #1 of the Edit 10 and Screen Widely: our small festival currently has over 200 entries from 48 countries. But most of all, I hope we can leverage our film festival to continue discussions about gender parity in the film industry and the world around us. Returning to Judith Helfland, I feel that “the core idea behind leveraging a film festival is to take the moment when a community of hearts and minds – a film festival audience – is caught up in the story and thinking ‘Oh gosh, what can I do?’” (254)
That story doesn’t have to be embedded in a film, the festival itself and the curriculum we teach can become a new story, as well.
References
Maudlyne Ihejirika, “Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: ‘Over the long haul, I have had it all’,” Chicago Sun Times September 12, 2017.
Leshu Torchin, “How to Leverage a Film Festival:An Interview with Judith Helfland, Filmmaker and Co-Founder of Chicken & Egg Pictures and Working Films,” Film Festival Yearbook 4: Film Festivals and Activism, edited by Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin (Edinburgh: St. Andrews Film Studies Press, 2012)
Augusta Palmer is a filmmaker and scholar who has created award-winning fiction, experimental, and documentary films. Her debut feature, The Hand of Fatima (2009), a feature documentary about music, mysticism, and family history which premiered at London’s Raindance Film Festival and was a New York Magazine Critic’s Pick during its NYC theatrical run. Her fiction short for children, “A is for Aye-Aye: An Abecedarian Adventure” (2015) played in festivals from New Zealand to New York. She is at work on a new documentary, The Blues Society, about the transformative power of the Memphis Country Blues Festivals (1966-1970). Palmer earned a Ph. D. in Cinema Studies from New York University and is an Associate Professor of Communication Arts at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York, where she co-founded and currently serves as Director of the St. Francis College Women’s Film Festival.
