Issue 4 - "A League of Their Own" Edition

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN EDITION

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CONTRIBUTORS REBECCA MARTIN, founder Rebecca Martin is the founder of Cinema Femme magazine.

Rebecca’s passion has always been film. She founded the Meetup group Chicago Film Lover Exchange in 2011, which has grown to over 6,000 members.

Along with film, Rebecca is passionate about empowering and encouraging other women to follow their dreams and passions.

ALISON MARCOTTE, editor Alison Marcotte is a writer and editor in Chicago area. She’s always been passionate about storytelling, no matter the medium. With a background in journalism and a passion for film, small businesses, and empowering other women, she’s excited to be part of the Cinema Femme team and movement.

JENNIFER JENKINS, graphic designer Jennifer Jenkins is an awardwinning designer who began her experience working at newspapers, but her love for graphic design was sparked back in high school. Starting with ad design and pre-press, she worked her way up to small magazines and eventually onto larger publications. From bright, splashy designs to clean, modern vibes, Jennifer brings a creative and fun spin to the design world.

GABRIELLE RISCANEVO, illustrator Gabrielle Riscanevo is a New York City–based illustrator and print designer and Cinema Femme’s “A League of Their Own” cover artist. Riscanevo creates her pieces using watercolor, gouache, and digital media. Her print designs have been featured on sleep and daywear brands. When she’s not creating art, she enjoys creating plant-based recipes and checking off movies from her Must-Watch list.

TAVI VERALDI, illustrator Tavi Veraldi is a Chicago-based illustrator. She describes her illustration style as bold, playful, and busy. The inspiration behind most of her work is the genre queer, classic Hollywood, and B movies she can get her hands on.

MARJORIE H. MORGAN, writer Marjorie H. Morgan is a writer, playwright, and journalist with special interest in cultural and social politics. Marjorie writes both critically and creatively for a number of national and international publications, such as The Guardian and Reader’s Digest, and she was recently shortlisted for the 15th Windsor Fringe International Kenneth Branagh Drama Award in 2018.

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PAMELA POWELL, film critic Pamela Powell, a member of the CFCA, BFCA, Rotten Tomatoes, and the WFCC, currently writes for both print and online publications, and cohosts a segment on WCIATV and WLRW radio. She attends film festivals around the world, including Sundance, SXSW, and Toronto, seeking new blockbusters and hidden independent gems. Pamela participates in panel discussions and local social impact film series and focuses on female filmmakers.

JAYLAN SALAH, writer Jaylan Salah is an Egyptian poet, translator, two-time national literary award winner, animal lover, feminist, film critic, and philanthropist. Jaylan’s book “Thus Spoke La Loba” is a short story collection that explores sexuality, gender, and issues of identity. Her first poetry book “Workstation Blues” will be published with PoetsIN, a publishing house with a purpose to destigmatize mental illness and support international artists.

AMY RENEE WASNEY, writer Amy Renee Wasney is a passionate writer and feminist living in the south suburbs of Chicago and an annual participant in National Novel Writing Month. Her favorite films include “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962), “The Princess Bride” (1987), and “Big Fish” (2003), and her personal heroes are Fred Rogers and Hermione Granger. She tries to live up to their example each and every day.

DANIELLE ACTON, writer Danielle Acton is a Columbia College Chicago junior in the Cinema & Television Department, studying Television Directing and Production. Danielle’s new to Chicago, with roots all the way back in Sacramento. She’s contributed to collectives such as The Light Leaks, and worked on Columbia’s campus as a content producer for Frequency TV.

ALYSE MCGUIGAN, writer Alyse McGuigan is a Chicagobased writer and performer from Park Ridge, IL. She majored in psychology at New York University where she cofounded a sketch comedy group that fueled her love for comedy. She is a graduate of the iO and Chicago Improv Den programs and has studied improv and writing at The Second City. She hopes to bring dynamic female characters to stages and screens everywhere.

ANYA CAMILLERI, interviewee Anya Camilleri is an awardwinning director and writer, best known for cocreating and directing primetime television drama “Liverpool 1,” a hard-hitting police series, starring Sam Janus, and “NY–LON,” a sophisticated transatlantic love story set in London and New York. Her short films “Perfect,” “Jealousy,” and “A Girl of No Importance” have garnered many festival wins internationally.

CAROLINE HELDMAN, interviewee Dr. Caroline Heldman is the research director for the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media and a professor at Occidental College. She works as a political commentator for CNN and she cofounded the New Orleans Women’s Shelter and the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum.

NIANI SCOTT, interviewee Niani Scott is a sophomore studying Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In her career as a journalist, she aims to tell stories holistically and truthfully on the lives of black people, as well as work to diversify newsrooms and media representation. As a 2017-2018 U of I College of Media Roger Ebert Fellow, she was mentored by Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips and gained firsthand experience in arts criticism.

TIFFANY WALDEN, interviewee Tiffany Walden is the cofounder and editor-in-chief of The TRiiBE, a Chicago-based digital media platform that is reshaping the narrative of Black Chicago through journalism and art. She is a member of the 2018 PoynterNABJ Leadership Academy class and a recipient of Adweek’s 20 Rising Brand Stars of Chicago.

Tiffany received two degrees from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

WHITNEY A. SPENCER, interviewee Whitney A. Spencer is completing a master’s degree in Critical Ethnic Studies at DePaul University, where her multimedia thesis project will focus on the culturally centered, community generated intellectual practices of Black people. After graduation, she hopes to find opportunities to continue to use storytelling to examine the broader culture.

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ERIN WOLF, interviewee Erin Wolf is an assistant editor and editor based in Los Angeles.

After spending her teenage years directing and editing her own movies, she graduated from USC’s Cinema-Television Production School. Erin has worked on shows such as “The Magicians” (Syfy), “You” (Lifetime/Netflix) and “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” (Netflix). She also assistant edited Ethan Hawke’s feature film “Blaze” and Nick Cannon’s “King of the Dancehall.”

GILLIAN GREENE, interviewee Gillian Greene is a feature film director and producer born and raised in Los Angeles. In 2014, Greene directed the feature film “Murder of a Cat.” Greene made her directorial debut in 2010, with the short film “Fanboy.”

Greene has multiple projects in development through her production company Pyewacket Pictures, which she founded in 2010.

LAURE DE CLERMONTTONNERRE, interviewee Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre is a French actress, producer, and director. She developed her short “Rabbit,” which was selected for Sundance in 2015, into her debut feature “The Mustang.”

She directed the pilot and two additional episodes of Hulu’s anthology series “The Act,” which is based on the true story explored in the HBO documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest.”

MICHELA CARATTINI, interviewee Michela Carattini is a multilocal actor, writer, and intimacy coordinator. The daughter of a Panamanian-American military intelligence officer and an Australian ballerina, Michela grew up in Germany, where she cultivated an interest in languages, obscure autobiographies, and criminal behavior. Her awardwinning storytelling is driven by her search for world’s compassion and intelligence.

PAMELA GREEN, interviewee Pamela Green’s work ranges from creative directing/producing main titles, motion graphics, TV and award show packages, directing/producing music videos and commercials, and archival research. Green creates and advises on internal story sequences and marketing such as for the Emmy-nominated documentary “Bhutto,” the Bourne series, “Fast and Furious,” “The Muppets,” and “Rings.”

REBECCA STERN, interviewee Rebecca Stern is the producer of “Tre Maison Dasan,” a documentary exploring the lives of children affected by parental incarceration, and coproducer of “Netizens,” a documentary delving into the effects of online sexual harassment. She was the associate producer of “the bomb,” an installation and film which premiered at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival and 2017 Berlinale Film Festival. “Well Groomed” is her first feature film.

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INTRODUCTION “IF YOU’RE NOT HAVING A GOOD TIME, FIND SOMETHING ELSE THAT GIVES YOU SOME JOY IN LIFE.” —Penny Marshall (October 15, 1943–December 17, 2018) When there is a passion inside you, you can’t deny it. When you find other people who share this passion, your life brings on a new meaning. And even more, when you’re a woman and your passion is shared with other women, this can become a driving force for your life. In “A League of Their Own” (1992), that shared passion between women is baseball. In Issue 4, “A League of Their Own” edition, we carry on that same spirit with personal essays about the film and interviews with women in film, accompanied by beautiful design and illustration.

Our issue seems very timely. One, because baseball season is starting (Go Cubs!), and two, because of the amazing work that’s being done by the film’s leading star Geena Davis. Davis is a trailblazer in the research of gender and media. I was fortunate to interview for this issue Caroline Heldman, the director of research at the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media (aka See Jane).

The theme of our March/April issue is Women’s History Month (March) and Sexual Assault Awareness Month (April). One interview I did was with Pamela B. Green, director of documentary “Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché” (2018). Pamela brought Alice to life by digging up her true story with her impeccable research skills. Thanks to Green, Alice has a rightful place back in film history. British filmmaker Anya Camilleri is passionate about telling the stories of women’s unseen history, specifically the voices of women sold through sex trafficking.

Her short “A Girl Of No Importance” (2017) premiered at Cannes and now will be leading to a feature film called “Highway of Love.”

Film critic Pamela Powell interviews filmmakers with recent festival releases: One is Rebecca Stern, director of the SXSW hit “Well Groomed” (2019), a documentary about creative dog grooming in America. And finally, I had the pleasure of interviewing the 2019 Sundance Ebert Fellows, Niani Scott, Whitney Spencer, and Tiffany Walden. These women are very talented, intelligent, and inspirational. I can’t wait for you all to watch the interviews and hear their stories.

We will be featuring more interviews (and the full versions of the following interviews) and personal essays on our website. Learn more about our online subscription options at cinemafemme. com.

—Rebecca Martin

CONTENTS Personal Essays 2019 Girl Power Film + Media Summit

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By Danielle Acton

A League of Their Own: The Hero is the Sidekick By Jaylan Salah

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Sisters, Doing it for Themselves

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By Marjorie H. Morgan

Two Sets of Rules By Amy Renee Wasney

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Sister - Sister By Alyse McGuigan

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Interviews Dr. Caroline Heldman on #MeToo and Representation

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A Conversation with the 2019 Sundance Ebert Fellows

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Pamela B. Green’s Documentary Honors Filmmaking Pioneer Alice Guy-Blaché

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Anya Camilleri’s “A Girl of No Importance” Brings Awareness to Human Trafficking and Sex Slavery

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Why Saying “Get Off the Internet” Is Terrible Advice for Victims of Online Harassment

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Erin Wolf on the Artistic Process of Editing a TV Show

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Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre on Animal Therapy, Rehabilitation, and Second Chances

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Gillian Greene on Her Comedy Short “Fanboy” and Finding Humor in Everyday Life

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Rebecca Stern Combines Her Love for Animals and Filmmaking with “Well Groomed”

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Dr. Caroline Heldman on #MeToo and Representation

BY REBECCA MARTIN Back in January during my trip in Los Angeles, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Caroline Heldman, research director at the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, associate professor of politics at Occidental College, and executive director of The Representation Project. Dr. Heldman also cofounded the New Orleans Women’s Shelter and the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum, End Rape on Campus (EROC), Faculty Against Rape (FAR), and End Rape Statute of Limitations (ERSOL). She’s been a professional pollster, campaign manager, and commentator for CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, and CNBC. Caroline Heldman is probably the most intelligent woman I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a lot of intelligent women! Her personal story increased my admiration for her even more. After we met, I was reignited to learn more about the landscape and climate of female representation in film and media.

GROWING UP REBECCA MARTIN: Where did you grow up?

CAROLINE HELDMAN: I grew up in a town of five hundred in Washington state in the foothills of Mount St. Helens. I was one of six, raised Pentecostal Evangelical. I was homeschooled and wasn’t allowed to see media until I left and went out on my own.

MARTIN: What brought you out of your small town?

HELDMAN: I started college pretty young, and once I graduated, I hopped on a plane and went to D.C. to work for Congress. I got out as soon as I possibly could.

MARTIN: What drew you to politics?

HELDMAN: My first political campaign was when I was seven years old. I lobbied for people in our town to turn on their lights because it was a high fog area. My parents are not political, but my father was very religious and instilled the idea of “unto the least of these”—helping those most in need. So I grew up with the sense of fixing injustice. I was a business major in undergraduate [at Washington State University], and I had a mentor/professor, Brent Steel, who encouraged me to pursue politics.

I headed to Capitol Hill to handle health care, women’s issues, and environmental issues for congresswoman Jolene Unsoeld. Then I did my graduate work at Rutgers because it had the only Women in Politics PhD program in the world.

CHANGE? MARTIN: Are you starting to see a change in the industry?

HELDMAN: There is greater awareness of misogyny and patriarchy with the #MeToo movement, but I don’t think as a culture we have established mechanisms of accountability. The #MeToo conversation started the national conversation back in 2013, then the Cosby survivors came forward en masse in 2015 with the women who blew the whistle on sexual harassment at Fox News. Attention peaked with the Weinstein survivors, but even today, institutions have not established effective methods 6

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to prevent sexual violence. Colleges and universities are still not doing a good job, and Hollywood is certainly not doing a good job addressing it. It really comes down to the fact that these are masculinist institutions, dominated by men, with rules that prefer and protect men in subtle ways.

MARTIN: What is your opinion about female voices in film, specifically with film criticism?

HELDMAN: I appreciate creating new spaces to hold entertainment media accountable, like CherryPicks, a new website that elevates female film critics. But I would really like to see the mainstream sites, like Rotten Tomatoes, elevate women’s voices as well.

GEENA DAVIS INSTITUTE ON GENDER IN MEDIA MARTIN: How long have you been with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media?

HELDMAN: Four years.

MARTIN: What is the work that the institute is doing? What is it trying to do to impact media culture? How did it get started?

HELDMAN: Geena Davis started her research organization in 2006 when she was watching a film with her daughter and realized that the content was quite sexist. She was a pioneer in raising awareness of Hollywood’s gender inequity through research and advocacy.

MARTIN: I’ve been doing a lot of research, because I want to be more aware of the problem of the lack of representation of women in media. That’s why I wanted to speak with you. I think it’s important to have the cold hard facts and data to back up your awareness.

HELDMAN: Male characters outnumber female characters 2 to 1, and we find similar gender inequities in television, advertising, and mascots. We have also published some important impact studies. For example, lots of little girls left the theater and bought a bow and arrow after watching Princess Merida (“Brave”) and Katniss Everdeen (“The Hunger Games”) in 2012.

We also did a study of the impact of Dana Scully’s (“The X-Files”) character and found that over 60 percent of women in STEM say she was an inspiration.

MARTIN: Have you seen “Girlhood” (2014), directed by Céline Sciamma? We will be covering that film later in the year.

I feel that coming-of-age films are less represented by women.

HELDMAN: Especially for women of color. Their stories are the most underrepresented in Hollywood. As bad as representation is for women in general, it’s far worse for women of color. They’re virtually erased as leading characters. A lot of it has to do with that we have very few women behind the scenes.

Only 17 percent of the people that are directing, producing, and writing are women. And that’s because the hiring practices in Hollywood look like the 1950s. It is quite extraordinary that it’s been going on this long.

REPRESENTATION IN 2018 FILMS MARTIN: For 2018, did you have any favorite films that you thought were good for representation?

HELDMAN: “Black Panther.”

MARTIN: Oh yes.

HELDMAN: Also, “Crazy Rich Asians” featured people of color and women in ways that we don’t typically see on the big

screen. My favorite content last year, that hit nearly every point for me, was the Netflix movie “To All the Boys I Loved Before.”

It stars a Korean American teenager—a coming-of-age film, but updated from the days of John Hughes because it’s more thoughtful, inclusive, and fantastic. My only critique is that none of the boys she loved before are Asian American boys. It’s rare to see Asian American men cast as romantic leads. I also love “Nappily Ever After.”

THE POWER OF RESEARCH MARTIN: When you’re doing your research for the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, what drives you in your research direction?

HELDMAN: We conduct research for clients who want to know whether their content is inclusive. We also publish the See Jane Report each year that measures the representation of women, people of color, LGBTQIA individuals, and people with disabilities in the top-viewed movies and television shows.

MARTIN: And that’s on your website?

HELDMAN: Yes, our reports are available to everyone! We also have a very unique tool called the GD-IQ. It’s the first automated tool for measuring screen time and speaking time. It’s two algorithms that can measure this automatically for characters by gender and race. We find that men appear and speak twice as often as women in the top-grossing films.

MARTIN: Who’s using this tool?

HELDMAN: The Geena Davis Institute developed this tool, in collaboration with Google and the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL) at USC. We are the only public re-

search organization that has the capability of automated media content analysis.

MARTIN: That is amazing. Before I started Cinema Femme magazine, I did a lot of research, specifically with women in Europe, and their studies about women in film. Having writers from Egypt and the UK, I realize this is not just a US problem, it’s a world problem, for representation in film and media.

HELDMAN: I’m glad we are in a time in history where we have access to a lot of data about media content—from the Geena Davis Institute, the Inclusion Initiative at USC, and the Center for the Study of Women in Television in Film at San Diego State University. A decade ago, things were much different.

Now we know exactly how underrepresented women, people of color, LGBTQIA folks, and people with disabilities are on the big and little screens.

In the fall, The Representation Project is hosting the first annual State of Media Summit to bring all of the public media research organizations together to talk about their findings.

MARTIN: Is that something anyone can go to?

HELDMAN: Yes, it will be open to the public, the press, other researchers, and media justice advocates.

MARTIN: And where will the summit be?

HELDMAN: The State of Media Summit will take place in Los Angeles.

MARTIN: I definitely will want to attend that. I want to thank you for taking the time to speak to me. What you’re doing is very important. Thank you for doing what you’re doing.

HELDMAN: Thank you for doing what you’re doing! ■

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A CONVERSATION with the 2019 Sundance Ebert Fellows

2019 Ebert Fellows Talk About Covering Sundance Film Festival

The Importance of Having Diverse Voices in Film Criticism

“I Want the Momentum to Stay There”: Sundance 2019 and Beyond

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Pamela B. Green’s Documentary Honors Filmmaking Pioneer Alice Guy-Blaché

BY REBECCA MARTIN MEETING ALICE REBECCA MARTIN: What inspired you to make “Be Natural”?

PAMELA B. GREEN: I work in Hollywood in the film industry, opening credits for films, and marketing. And I had seen something on TV, it was short segment about women pioneers in cinema. She popped up, there was a little segment about her.

And I didn’t know who she was; it was something about looking at her face. The fact that she was a director, a writer, producer, and had her own studio, early on.

MARTIN: How old was she when she got started?

GREEN: Twenty-three, was when she made her first narrative. She was working as a secretary.

MARTIN: Oh wow.

GREEN: So the narrative part, I wasn’t even thinking about that, just a woman who was doing all of these things, was an entrepreneur, and an artist. It bugged me that I didn’t know more about her, but when you don’t know something, you start asking other people, and then I realized that a lot of people don’t know about her. So I then I decided to do something.

MARTIN: What about her life drew you in the most? In terms of her style and the kind of films that she made, what drew you in to that?

GREEN: For me, I think the biggest thing was, the biggest challenge was, that Hollywood didn’t make this movie, and they didn’t fund it either. And the only way that I was going to be able to make a difference was to find new material. And I love research, I’m a detective by nature.

I knew the only way it was going to work, that she would become known—I didn’t care about my stuff, I wanted to do justice for her—was to find new material, technically it was a detective story, not a history.

MARTIN: That is amazing. I love that.

GREEN: What I like about it, her films are modern and universal and it’s a very modern story of somebody, you know like somebody making films on YouTube or going out as an indie filmmaker. That’s how she started and that’s how we started.

MARTIN: When you say detective story, what does that mean? Was that how you formatted it? Like how you told her story?

GREEN: So Jodie Foster narrated, and she speaks French, so that helps. We needed an amazing voice, and she’s also very intelligent, and a director as well, and understands story. So having her be apart of the collaboration was amazing. And also having the detective element fill in the holes about things we don’t know about Alice was the connector of the dots. I think when you see the film you’ll know what I’m talking about.

MARTIN: Great, looking forward to seeing the film.

GREEN: But it was for me, doing her justice, pretty much, you know, people who may say, “She’s an old lady, was she important? Did she do anything?” Everything that she says, I looked up and it checked out, it was kind of crazy. Whatever she would say... she was my guide in a way.

MARTIN: That’s great.

GREEN: It didn’t end for me until I got everything that she would have hoped for or putting things on the screen to validate what she is saying. It was amazing towards the end of finishing the film, some of these other things popped up, really filled as many holes as possible. Not only to preserve the legacy, but to give her a face, and humanize her, not just to be a footnote, or a tribute.

FINAL THOUGHTS GREEN: I hope that people like the movie, when they see it, and hope they are inspired by Alice to either… there’s an Alice in all of us, and just go out there and do it, it doesn’t matter.

Especially in 2019, there’s no excuse; if you want to be a filmmaker, just pick up a camera and do the film. Don’t ever worry about someone giving you permission. I didn’t wait for them, I went out and did it on my own. And I’m definitely not waiting on them for any other projects.

MARTIN: Right.

GREEN: You should never wait, you should just go out there.

It’s really, really hard, but if you surround yourself with people who are really, really passionate, and really care, and have your back, that’s it. That’s all you need, you just need someone to believe in you, you need to have that. If you work really, really hard, it’s really a lot of effort, but you should be able to make it.

MARTIN: Your passions speak through all of it.

GREEN: Exactly. I would tell people on the street about it, I told somebody on the plane about it. I’m excited about Alice, but you have to really love what you do. If you don’t love it, then you ain’t going to make it.

If you really love it, if you have other people that love what you’re doing, and they love it too, you’re following it. ■

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Anya Camilleri’s “A Girl of No Importance” Brings Awareness to Human Trafficking and Sex Slavery

BY REBECCA MARTIN GROWING UP REBECCA MARTIN: Where did you grow up?

ANYA CAMILLERI: I’m a woman of the world. My father was the national composer of a small, beautiful island called Malta, but he didn’t see the world as the small island; music was global to him. Our life was all over the place. So every five years we moved. I was born in Canada in fact, Toronto, where my father was working at the time. Then we went to England, and then we went to Paris. We had a house in London, we had a house in Malta. And we moved around.

MARTIN: Where is Malta?

CAMILLERI: Malta is a small island in the center of the Mediterranean Sea; it’s nineteen miles by nine.

We lived in Malta for what seemed the longest stretch—between age about nine to fifteen—which are quite formative years. It was an idyllic childhood, we ran free in the fields surrounding our house and had summers on the beach, outdoor discos.

When I was about thirteen, I started directing plays at school and staging them for the public. I didn’t know what directing really was; I instinctively organized all the actors and knew what stories I wanted to tell.

I didn’t know what a director really was, we just created these incredible, ambitious productions. Then one day, I realized I wanted to be a director, it was exciting. At seventeen, I said to my parents, all I want is a camera. I only want a camera.

I didn’t want any presents for the rest of my life, I just wanted a camera. So they bought me this Super 8 camera.

I wrote a script, hired professional actors for free, and made a film in Malta that was quite unusual, and was talked about a lot... and then I went to film school in England.

MARTIN: Where did you go to film school?

CAMILLERI: I read Film and Theatre at Reading University, so I studied the history of cinema, and the history of theatre. It was a great course; you had to act, direct plays, stage manage, make movies. It was a really good background.

After the course ended, the tutors, who were brilliant, sat us down and said, “None of you are going to get employed; it’s impossible to get into the film or theatre business unless you are connected.” When I came out of university, I didn’t know a single person in film or theatre, but I was determined to prove them wrong.

COOKING FOR TINA CAMILLERI: I searched all the newspapers looking for a job; all the wrong ones, because I didn’t know where to look.

After fruitless searches, hundreds of applications, I found this tiny advert at the bottom of the page of the local paper. It said “Chef, cook, in film studios.” When I got to the interview, there were hundreds of applicants, so I sat in the middle of the vast room on the boss’s armchair where no one else was sitting and 10

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I got the job, even though I couldn’t boil an egg.

I started work at the film studio, and knew I had to learn to cook—fast. Tina Turner came in to make a huge budget video with hundreds of extras, my brother Charlie Camilleri was playing the drums, and I was cooking for like five hundred people, learning/bluffing as I went along.

MARTIN: That is insane.

CAMILLERI: In the kitchen there was a book of seasonal cooking that I followed, but I was clueless.

And so I was in this kitchen, during the filming of the video, which was downstairs, and Tina Turner comes storming off the set, and heading to the kitchen. I was shitting myself because stars never came to the kitchen, because it’s a different part of the studio. So I was like, damn, I’m going to be fired. Tina arrives yelling, “Who’s the cook? Who’s the cook?” I was like “Me.” She said, “Come with me, come with me.” Now I’m like, oh no, I’m going to be fired publicly.

So she took me down to the set, it was lunchtime and everyone was eating all the food I had prepared. Standing there with Tina Turner, I assumed it was all a disaster and wanted the earth to swallow me up.

MARTIN: Oh my god, I love it.

CAMILLERI: And then she said, “Here is the amazing woman who makes all this great food—this is Anya, everyone!” All the

Anya Camilleri directing actress Yuliia Sobol on the set of “A Girl of No Importance” crew and cast started clapping. One of the funniest moments of my life, because I was just like, I literally didn’t know what I was doing.

TV AND FILMMAKING TRANSITION CAMILLERI: In my pre-kids career I directed mainly TV drama, films with the BBC, and my husband screenwriter Simon Burke and I cocreated an original seven-hour TV series, called “NY-LON” (2004), about a transatlantic love affair starring Rashida Jones and Stephen Moyer, for C4 in the UK. Simon and I created another TV series called “Liverpool 1” (1998) which was a brilliant series about the families of policemen, set in the North of England. There were some big stars in that. The series went for two years running. Then I directed a movie which starred Tara Reid, “Incubus” (2006). But I had two young children, Alice and Jack. My friends would say to me, “How can you do all this, when you’re filming all night?”

We didn’t want our kids to be brought up by nannies, so I stayed home. I was happy with the family but at the same time hurting because I missed directing so much. But I wrote scripts, and I developed my storytelling passion in this period.

Also I am fortunate enough to have a wonderful agent, Elizabeth Dench at Seifert Dench in London, who is extraordinary. This is how special she is, she did not mind if I wasn’t earning money during those years. She said, “I know your talent.”

And that gave me a wonderful feeling, that I could be with my children, and not feeling I couldn’t direct anymore. So she stuck with me all the way.

Yuliia Sobol was stunning.

CAMILLERI: Thanks. Yuliia Sobol is a wonderful, instinctive actress. And she’s unafraid. So when I made the film, I came into contact with all of these people in trafficking, and I uncovered all of these facts that I want to share.

MARTIN: Please, go ahead.

CAMILLERI: Thirty-two billion is made off of sex trafficking in the US alone, forty-two million people right now trapped in prostitution on a global scale. Ninety-eight percent are women and girls. There are about two million in the United States alone.

While most of the world’s illegal income comes from drugs and

ROAD TO “A GIRL OF NO IMPORTANCE” CAMILLERI: I came back into directing recently. What happened was I was in Rome, traveling up and down a particular motorway, where I kept seeing these really beautiful women on the side of the road, who didn’t look like prostitutes. They were just too young and beautiful. I thought, why don’t they become receptionists, why are they doing this shitty job? Why do they do that? It doesn’t make sense. Something didn’t add up.

I went to find them, I went through charities and channels, it took me awhile. I met and interviewed girls who had been trafficked. It was quite scary, because one of them, the guy who trafficked her was living down the road. But it was incredible hearing their stories, stories which I knew would never be told, as no one cares about these lost girls.

They were kidnapped, they were not girls who were ever thinking of prostitution, and they were forced on the road, and they were told, “We know where you live, we’ll kill your parents, we will kill your baby brother. If you do anything, you’re dead.”

So they were blackmailed in to prostitution.

I felt compelled to tell their story, so we made this film, “A Girl of No Importance” (2017), with the incredible Mark Morgan from Stella’s Voice who saves girls from trafficking and a financier who is in invested in stopping sex trafficking. All these people got together, and I said, I have this vision for this film, but it’s not ugly, it’s actually very beautiful, because if it’s too ugly no one’s going to want to watch it. I wanted the ugliness to transmit through emotion as I felt it would be more powerful.

So with very little money we went to the center of medieval Rome and we filmed in locations that are very hard to access, but I love Ancient Rome and I think this transmits. Have you seen “A Girl of No Importance”?

MARTIN: Yes, I watched it, and I loved it.

CAMILLERI: In that film you’ll see sequences, with all of these Baroque ancient sculptures, and incredible Roman architecture.

MARTIN: Yeah, it was beautiful.

CAMILLERI: Nobody’s really allowed to film there, but I had this extraordinary determination, and we had an amazing team; line producer Stefano Daniele really helped me realize this vision. We wanted the film to look like a movie. The main character Alina is lost, she has never before been outside the room they held her captive in; when she escapes, she finds herself alone in this incredible medieval city. I wanted to have the beauty of Rome versus the ugliness of trafficking, as a contrast.

MARTIN: You could have gone the gritty route, you used a little bit of grit, but I liked the beauty contrasting. I loved it. Also

Yuliia Sobol as Alina in “A Girl of No Importance” arms now, human trafficking is rapidly taking over. Listen to this one—if you sell a drug, it’s once and then it’s gone. But with a person, you can resell her or him, twenty-plus times; people are “reusable.”

MARTIN: That’s awful.

CAMILLERI: So a girl can make around $250,000 for a pimp per year. So if a pimp has like ten girls, can you imagine what he can earn?

MARTIN: That’s sick, that’s horrible, thank you for sharing this with me. I think a lot of people just don’t know about all of this. So I appreciate you telling this story, it’s really sad.

CAMILLERI: I regard myself as an intelligent, aware person, yet I didn’t know much about trafficking—that women were sold like properties, on the street and everywhere. They are tattooed like cattle to show the pimp’s ownership.

When I discovered this, and started talking to people, a lot of educated people, they didn’t know anything either. And I thought, bloody hell, we’ve got to bring this to the world. It’s a story that has to be told. So then I wrote a feature film called “Highway of Love,” [which is based on “A Girl of No Importance.”] ■

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WHY SAYING

“Get Off the Internet” Is Terrible Advice for Victims of Online Harassment Rebecca Martin interviewed actor, writer, and intimacy coordinator Michela Carattini about her film “Remote Access,” which she cowrote and coproduced with screenwriter Leanne Mangan. Penelope Berkemeier directed the film. “Remote Access” premiered at the 2019 Girl Power Film + Media Summit in Brooklyn.

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Erin Wolf on the Artistic Process of Editing a TV Show

BY REBECCA MARTIN ROAD TO “CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA” MARTIN: Could you walk me through your career, since you graduated? What took you to where you’re at now?

WOLF: I graduated in 2011, and I was very open to opportunities. I actually found my first job on Craigslist, and it was to intern on a feature at a postproduction house. I was working pretty much solely on the feature for awhile, and then I started interning for the postproduction house as a whole. I got to experience working on commercials and music videos there, which was a much different editing style than narrative projects.

MARTIN: That’s good experience though, to try out all those different areas.

WOLF: I got to play around with editing my own versions of the videos, and I had the opportunity to show the editors and ask, “What do you think of this?” “What could I have done differently to make it better?”

Music videos are such a different kind of medium. There’s not necessarily a defined structure on how to edit a music video. A lot of it is driven by the music, and how the cuts feel with the song. You can be so creative in how you interpret the video.

So that was really fun and a great learning experience, and about six months into me interning there, I became a full-time assistant editor. I worked there for about three years.

MARTIN: What were the videos and features you were involved in?

WOLF: There were some pretty well-known artists like Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga. But there were also a lot of indie artists. We had a big range of projects come in. I worked there for a few years, and I really loved it. Because it was a pretty small post house, it felt like a family. And as much as I enjoyed working there, I decided after awhile that I really wanted to go toward narrative projects. I just had to figure out how to make the jump from music videos to scripted.

Eventually I was able to join the Editors Guild and met an editor who was looking for an assistant for a scripted show. It turned out we both came from a music video editing background, so we were making that transition together. The show we worked on together was Kevin Hart’s “Real Husbands of Hollywood.”

MARTIN: Oh yes, that’s right, I remember it.

WOLF: It was a really fun show to work on. And it was my first experience outside of school working on scripted content.

MARTIN: As an editor, what influences your choices on how they come together?

WOLF: As I’ve worked on more and more projects, I would say the feeling of “what or who do I want to see now” drives a lot of my editing choices. So let’s say we have a scene where you and I are having a conversation in a café. Maybe you start the scene with a wide shot, setting up the space and that we are talking to one another. From there, you find a line or a look that might motivate your next cut and who you see next. A lot of it is based on intuition, and what feels natural to want to be

looking at next. It’s good to think about what the scene is about.

Reactions are so important, too. Oftentimes the actors’ performances will drive when and what you cut to next.

And I think what’s interesting is that there’s not just one correct way to edit a scene. It’s more about what feels right to you. There are so many ways of how you could cut a certain scene depending on how you choose to order the shots, or how long you choose to hold on a certain shot. It can really affect how the scene comes across.

ASSISTANT EDITOR MARTIN: As an assistant editor, how does it work with your relationship to the head editor?

WOLF: First we receive the footage, and the assistant editor sorts through all of it. Oftentimes there is more than one camera that may be shooting at the same time, so we group clips together and make sure they are synced up properly. From that point, the editor will edit the scene. Then usually they’ll pass it on to the assistant editor to clean up dialogue and do the sound and music design.

The sound and music design is one of my favorite aspects of assistant editing because it’s a good opportunity to be creative. The assistant editor also takes care of outputs so directors and producers can watch cuts. And once the episode has been

picture locked, we take care of turning over the episode for final sound, music, visual effects, and such.

So being an assistant editor, there is the technical aspect of the job and there is a creative element as well. And Rita [Sanders], the editor that I’ve been working with for a while now, also lets me edit some scenes, which is really fun and a great way to learn. For the episode of “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” that we got to coedit, we each edited about half of the episode.

That was such a great experience, and I can’t stress enough how supportive Rita has been as we’ve continued to work together. ■

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2019

Girl Power Film + Media Summit

BY DANIELLE ACTON

T

he work I saw was crafted with time and effort and filled more than just quotas. They were filling us with inspiration for a future in which female-identifying filmmakers are seen as equally important to our male counterparts in the film industry. And that is the power in attending the 2019 Girl Power Film + Media Summit.

As a college student, you don’t get many opportunities to network outside of your own classmates, and while my classmates at Columbia College Chicago are amazing creators in their own right, it can feel suffocating. I’m on the cusp of graduation, which is why working for Cinema Femme has been so liberating to me in terms of networking opportunities.

This past winter, I was brought in as a marketing coordinator for the team, and one of the first companies I reached out to was Imagine This Productions through their support for The Light Leaks, who I’ve worked with before. We were invited by founders Susie Francois and Patrice Francois to be a partner for the 2019 Girl Power Film + Media Summit in Brooklyn, and the summit blew me away.

As a student in Chicago I can feel limited to just Chicago creators, but stepping into New York to discuss women in film with an international group of people was refreshing. This experience allowed me to connect and talk about not only my work for the magazine, in terms of us looking for future interviews, advertising, and collaboration opportunities, but also my work as a student studying television. I was able to speak with other college filmmakers and even see their screened work.

I also spoke to industry professionals who are building a place for themselves in a male-dominated field, and it could not be more inspiring. I went in feeling like a shy college student who was out of their element and I came out feeling empowered and in my right place.

Sometimes it can feel as if imposter syndrome sneaks up on you fast in this line of work, and being reaffirmed that you have a voice that can make waves with what you do is important. I can recall tangible moments in my career where I’ve felt like my work was a waste, but my work with Cinema Femme has shown me that even the smallest of connections can make a 14

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difference. If I hadn’t sent a simple email, then I would have never found this beautiful opportunity. No matter the amount of work you do, it is still valuable to this industry as we move forward with empowering women directors. I think that is what I learned the most during my time in New York as I saw each woman around me sharing her experience and her work from international places.

The allyship of sisterhood is such a strong connection that we at Cinema Femme are proud to uphold so that female-identifying filmmakers have a place within our society that has previously swept them under the rug.

Our voices ring out louder when we support each other, and I know as I move forward in my career it will not be without women at the helm bolstering us up.

You can feel as if you’re not fulfilling your full creative potential, and then be sparked into coming to the understanding that your mere contributions are part of the process in which you come to your creativity, and that constant creation does not define a creator.

The work I saw was crafted with time and effort and filled more than just quotas. They were filling us with inspiration for a future in which female-identifying filmmakers are seen as equally important to our male counterparts in the film industry. And that is the power in attending the 2019 Girl Power Film + Media Summit. ■

Photo credit: Millie Gillana

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A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN The Hero is the Sidekick

BY JAYLAN SALAH

I

n patriarchal societies, sisterhood is treated as an unannounced competition: One will always be prettier, more successful, wealthier, marry the better guy, and have the more picture-perfect family. And sisters pose an infinite source of entertainment for judgmental aunts and uncles—even parents!

In “A League of Their Own” (1992), the late Penny Marshall uses baseball, a very American, very masculine sport, to pit two sisters against each other, testing their love, loyalty, and how they sometimes stand in the way of feminine independence.

Many films have covered the sister-sister relationship, specifically the inferiority/superiority complex that emerges from one sister being more successful than the other.

Some more notable examples include: • •

•

•

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“Vox Lux” (2018), directed by Brady Corbet.

“In Her Shoes” (2005), directed by Curtis Hanson, which pits the stereotypical archetype of a successful, physically unappealing woman versus her gorgeous, brainless younger sister.

“Proof” (2005), directed by John Madden, which is about a blond protégé who shares her father’s brains and mental illness and is completely manipulated by her older, white-collar sister.

And “America’s Sweethearts” (2001), directed by Joe Roth.

The younger, nerdy sister is subservient to her gorgeous, older megastar sister, yet secretly falls in love with her estranged husband.

Most of the films about sister-sister relationships were created, directed, and written by men. Beauty was an integral factor in the feminine rivalry archnemesis, and so was career status.

However, the main cause for sibling rivalry in most movies involves, sadly, a man. Two sisters would destroy each other’s lives for the sake of a trophy at the end of the movie, which usually refers to a man. Rarely did we get a glimpse into a complex relationship where love—alongside a bigger passion other than beauty and sex appeal—played a part in defining societal and gender roles, with respect to the sister-sister bond.

Marshall’s film “A League of Their Own” pays homage to how many women are given the unfair burden of choosing either domesticity or worldliness. In her portrayal of Dottie and Kit’s characters, Marshall shows a complex case of how reality works for women. The more talented Dottie is also prettier yet underestimates herself; even when she is given the chance to join a league of women who share the same capabilities, she denies it, satisfied with a life of docile compliance that her parents and husband expect.

Her sister, Kit, is the polar opposite. She is a minority in being subsidiary to her older sister. Within her sheltered community, she is usually dismissed as less beautiful and less talented. Yet her passion and motivation are bigger than those of Dottie’s and this motivation is what pulls them both forward to join the league.

Both women are taken out of their natural habitat. Thrown into the field, they both transform into different characters. The love that was seemingly eternal between them turns into several conflicts. They become rivals and Kit is transferred to another team, only for the sibling rivalry to soar.

There is no denial that Kit and Dottie love each other, but the unequal opportunities and circumstances handed to both make it difficult for Kit to overcome her inadequacies with respect to Dottie’s better chances at being an accepted, desirable woman in her society. Dottie represents the trope most of us feel inferior to: she has perfected the daughter role, the wife role, and the societal role. Kit, on the other hand, is always scrutinized for being un-Dottie-like. Despite having never been granted an equal opportunity to express and represent herself as her sister, Kit has finally found her calling through baseball.

Joining the Rockford Peaches offers Kit an equal opportunity of representation in a major systemic, if not holistically neutral, way. That’s when Dottie and Kit are treated equally; despite the grading system of beautification of women, their skills on the field are what make them distinct. This results in elevating Kit to a pedestal facing her more talented sister, where she makes up for what she lacks in talent through passion, enthusiasm, and motivation.

lationship is built, to be replaced by constructive competitive sports.

In “A League of Their Own,” women make major decisions, even wrong ones. When Jimmy is too hungover to take over his role in terms of creating a lineup, Dottie takes charge. She’s a natural-born leader, yet her submission to a life of domesticity offers her a backdoor to “willingly” abandon her ambition and authoritative persona to become a doting housewife.

This is what patriarchy does to women. Not only do women who lack the same luster of beauty, power, race, or social status suffer, but those who conform to the patriarchal grading system of being on top because of their looks or superior house management skills suffer the most.

A woman with the strength of character and talent like Dottie abandons her ability to shine on the field, stating that she won’t miss “putting on all the gear, catching a double header in 100-degree heat, pushing the bus through mud, getting slammed into every other day by a base runner.”

Dottie is manipulated by the patriarchy into believing that her life on the field is the cause of her agony, of her physical exertion and her pain, while her domestic existence would not cause her any further harm. Patriarchy promises women the lure of a safe, sheltered life within the corners of their homes, blissfully baking, enjoying sex every afternoon, looking after tired husbands, and giving their full focus to children. Only for these women to discover that they have been handed a sugarcoated lie wrapped in tears and disappointments and inadequacy with a full-time working husband.

Women have always been assigned roles based on their race, looks, social status, and place on the sexualization meter. Despite being unsexualized herself, loving wife Dottie is usually eyed by the men in “A League of Their Own” as an object of desire. In a scene, Ernie Capadino appraises Kit by moving his hand along her arm, as if weighing meat for the next meal.

When she gets his approval, she is still asked to bring in her more talented, “hotter” sister.

Throughout “A League of Their Own,” I envisioned that I would come out of the experience rooting for Dottie or the sexually provocative “All the Way” Mae, probably due to my infatuation with Madonna previously in “Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985).

Art works in mysterious ways. I rooted for Kit, and even though I realized I really wanted the sisters to make up at the end, Marshall gave me that underdog I could not take my eyes off, one I would cheer for till the end credits.

On this rare occasion, this underdog is a woman! ■

As sibling rivalry intensifies, Dottie and Kit find themselves on opposing sides; they drift apart since their competition takes a “healthier” turn as opposed to the crooked surface on which they were compared previously. Gone are the self-promotion and competitor derogation innuendos on which Dottie and Kit’s reCINEMA FEMME MAGAZINE

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Sisters, Doing it for

Themselves

BY MARJORIE H. MORGAN

E

verybody loves an underdog story, and everybody loves a sports story. “A League of Their Own” (1992) is a combination of both genres. The underdog is this case is the average American woman left behind as the ravages of World War II has stripped the country of its fit and healthy young men.

While American male bodies are being destroyed by bullets and bombs fighting overseas, the country is feeling the void of masculinity in homes, factories, and sports arenas. The film starts with the portrayal of male absence by the initial images of playing children and lonesome wives followed by long lingering shots over photographs of men who do not exist in the present or the recent past. The film shows the route from relative rural isolation to public community and unity of purpose.

The Queen of Diamonds, a recently bereaved grandmother Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis), bookends the film as she reluctantly revisits her memory of her younger days journeying from a member of the country baseball team, Lukash Dairy, to the star of the national Rockford Peaches team; it was something, she says, that “was never that important to me. It was just something I did.”

Fundamentally, “A League of Their Own” is a story of sisterhood in the narrowest sense. The siblings Kit Keller (Lori Petty) and Dottie join the first female professional baseball league and they struggle to help it succeed amidst their own growing rivalry; additionally the sisters join a wider sisterhood of the women of the league when they get to Chicago and become members of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. While Dottie professes her reluctance to leave her rural farm life for the city and baseball prospects, her younger sister Kit pleads with Dottie—the favoured star prospect—to accept the opportunity because for Kit it is a chance to break free of the strictures of the family home: “Please Dottie, I’ve gotta get outta here. I’m nothing here.” It is sisterly sacrifice that leads to the two sisters joining the inaugural intake of the first female professional baseball league; they join the national campaign to help the league succeed amidst their own personal growing rivalry.

Sacrifice is a continuing theme of the film: Dottie, apparently happily married and settled in her job and home, gives up her country life to give her sister Kit a chance to fulfill her own dream; Marla Hooch’s father, a widower from Fort Collins, Colorado, actively encourages the baseball scout Ernie Capadino (Jon Lovitz) to take his skillful daughter because “nothing’s ever gonna happen here. You gotta go where things happen”; the selected baseball players agree to impractical baseball uniforms along with charm and beauty classes because “every girl in this league is going to be a lady,” according to the sales requirement of Ira Lowenstein.

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Lowenstein, working for the baseball league owners, led by financier and chocolatier Walter Harvey, is tasked with filling the temporary gap in the sport and making the women’s game into a salable product. Naturally, some women in the 1940s who are the depiction of propriety—notably four portly Chicago middle-class, middle-aged women in matronly patterned dresses, with matching handbags and pearls—publicly express their disgust at the prospects of women in sports by using a language of violence to describe women outside of the home, in both education and in baseball, as “leading to the masculinisation of women with enormously dangerous consequences to the home, the children, and our country,” and “the most disgusting example of this sexual confusion” as “young girls are plucked from their families… to see which one of them can be the most masculine.” It was the general contention that women were to be kept separate from baseball and public displays as sports ignited the passions and therefore it should be avoided by the “fairer sex.” The position of the staid homemaking American woman alters by the end of the film when, at final of the Women’s World Series, the national anthem is led on the baseball field by a doppelgänger of Maida Gillespie, the woman who spoke so ferociously against the idea of sportswomen being highly publicised.

The central premise of the detractors of women in sports was that the world worked well because it was organised on simple binary oppositions of men and women, work and home, country and city, and these boundaries should not be breached.

Dottie and Kit’s parents were portrayed as the ideal image of family life: a homely couple on a farm with the mother fussing around the needs of the central father figure. Their daughters both abandoned the stereotypical role of women by becoming baseball players in the city showing a contrast to the traditional roles of femininity and the modern rise of feminist personal agency outside of the home. Throughout the film, women are seen as being catapulted from the comfort of the contained family hearth into the open centre of the competitive baseball field. A place where they were encouraged to identify as people with desires, people who wanted to win.

The game of baseball becomes an intense and passionate experience for everyone involved right from the spectators, the reluctant coach, to the highly competitive leagues of women players.

Other themes central to the film are misogyny, feminism, and masculinity. The Rockford Peaches’ coach, Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks), is portrayed as an alcoholic former World Series calibre baseball player being given a second chance to redeem his status as a baseball legend. Dugan views the women’s baseball game with disgust and turns up drunk for the first several games when he is nothing more than a token—a gender role reversal—used to promote the status of the game. Dugan is initially portrayed as a weak persona, a position usually reserved for the females in a film. “A League of Their Own” is full of usual and unusual contrasts, many of them based around the 1940s public image of femininity related to the home and sports.

An often overlooked element in the film is the role of Black people. They are viewed in mainly service roles: as musicians or cleaners. However, there is one moment, halfway through the film, when a stray ball is picked up by a Black woman on the boundary of the baseball field, then when Dottie Hinson calls for her to throw the ball back, the Black woman throws it with ease so it soars past Hinson to a farther placed catcher.

Hinson visually expresses surprise, the Black woman sadly acknowledges the regularity of her overlooked skill, and she is left to return to the sidelines where a group of other similarly isolated Black men and women stand. This short scene references the informal segregation of sports that was in place in the early 1940s. The colour bar was broken in the men’s game when Jackie Robinson was signed for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1946 baseball season. Marcenia Lyle Stone, commonly known as Toni Stone, was the first Black woman to join a professional baseball team, although she did not join a women’s team as they were still segregated; Toni Stone joined the Indianapolis Clowns and crossed a gender line into the men’s team where she played professionally, in traditional baseball uniform—not skirts.

The images of beauty, Eurocentric ideals, are one of the major factors that decide which women throughout the countrywide sweep for talent gets picked for the tryouts in Chicago. Despite Marla Hooch’s skill, the baseball scout openly rejects her when he first sees her face. This is regardless of the fact that he was amazed by her performance. What Capadino does not expect is that his position of ultimate power is instantly challenged when the bond of sisterhood is immediately portrayed as the Oregon sisters refuse to leave Colorado without Marla.

This is a drama, a sports movie, and a comedy combined. The comedic elements are usually visual or one-liners by Jimmy Dugan, Evelyn Gardner (Bitty Schram), or the crudeness of the baseball scout Ernie Capadino.

The visual comedy centres, in a frequent misogynistic gaze, on moments when the boundaries of decorum are breached like when the drunken Jimmy Dugan turns up on the first match day and urinates for an exceptionally long time just out of the visual line of the women in the changing room. “All the Way” Mae Mordabito (Madonna) is central to this scene as a curious and intrigued onlooker. Madonna, and her on-screen comedy partner Rosie O’Donnell, as Doris Murphy, have several two-hander moments including watching and timing the sot who is forced on them as a coach, and other risqué encounters.

Initially the new recruits, dressed in physically unsuitable short skirt uniforms, are discouraged by the unsupportive baseball fans; however, they are admirably portrayed by the director, Penny Marshall, as women who are encouraging of each other despite their obvious team rivalry. Marshall manages to show how American women of the ’40s were often conflicted between their personal ambition and their nationally prescribed duty. Eventually the public begins to appreciate the women’s league for both their skills and their looks with newspaper headlines eventually conceding that “Girls really do play baseball.”

The women of the baseball teams grow in respect and sup-

port of each other, and mutual respect is also nurtured between coach Dugan and the women after their initial opposition toward each other. Dugan’s emotional journey is shown as the most altered because at the end of the war, when the baseball-playing men are set to return from overseas, he is offered a new position in the male league, but he refuses it to stay with the women’s league.

“A League of Their Own” is a film that is still celebrated as a great sports movie after over a quarter of a century since its release.

It is a film than depicts women as the central characters on the screen and gives them varied and detailed storylines. This film highlights the fact that women playing major league baseball was a significant event in the history of sports and society in the 1940s, and ensures that this event is never forgotten or discarded.

Many female sports movies focus on the athletic goal usually as a secondary matter; director Penny Marshall highlights the women’s athleticism and also uses this film to accentuate the everyday adversities, boundaries, and glass ceilings that women outside of the home, outside of the current “norm,” will face.

The underdog in this story is Kit Keller who ends up achieving the final win, while eventually gaining a better understanding of her sister Dottie. Kit and the other female players are repeatedly told that there’s “no crying in baseball”; however, they retain their full emotional range and still succeed in the sports arena.

In the regular reunions of the cast since the release of the film, art reflects life as the depictions of the sisterhood of the Rockford Peaches has lasted offscreen as well.

The women’s league teams are base stealers in the sports arena: slowly but surely they creep their way into the hearts and minds of the American public, both in the 1943 to 1954 All-American Girls Professional Baseball League and in the canon of favourite sports movies. What was supposed to be a temporary measure to entertain the American public during the horrors of war became a successful “product” with nearly a million spectators at the peak of their games. At the final of the World Women’s Series, Hinson says to her sister and team rival, “Play great,” as sisterhood trumps game rivalry.

The film concludes with a reunion of the women league players, but most significantly with the reconnection of the sisters Dottie and Kit who through time had become estranged because of baseball and team rivalry and then individual family dynamics.

“A League of Their Own” is a monument to the collaborations, relationships, and friendships of women both on-screen and behind the camera. The female writer, Kim Wilson, manages to intricately portray the familiar struggles of women, and for nearly three decades viewers of all genders and ages have recognised themselves in the characters portrayed. This film has been the vehicle by which many people have decided that it is OK to get “dirt in the skirt” on the way to achieve their personal goals. ■

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TWO SETS OF RULES

BY AMY RENEE WASNEY

W

hen men participate, it’s an event. When women participate, it’s a show. In video games, male characters wear full suits of armor; female characters wear metal bikinis. In comic books and superhero movies, men wear tactical suits and are featured in fight scenes; women wear outfits designed to show off their breasts and are featured posing in impossible yoga positions. In sports, boys play the game; girls play the game too but they have to do it while wearing a skirt and looking pretty. It doesn’t seem to matter what the actual activity is—there seems to always be a double standard when it comes to men’s and women’s activities.

In “A League of Their Own” (1992), those double standards are everywhere. Women were not even allowed to come and try out unless Ernie Capadino (Jon Lovitz) decided they looked attractive enough. Once they had been deemed attractive enough to play baseball and they made it through the tryouts, they were then shown their new uniform—a dress—and told that in order to play in the league, they would have to attend charm school.

The list of double standards is ever growing, and the women haven’t even played their first game.

The double standards regarding appearance are the big thing we see before the season gets underway, but once the women are actually playing baseball, that’s when even more signs of sexist double standards start popping up at every turn, creating unforeseen obstacles for the women who just wanted to play baseball.

As the first season of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) progresses, the Rockford Peaches face challenges from all angles. They spend a number of games playing without a coach while the man who is supposed to be coaching them sits in the corner, drunk and grumbling about “I don’t have ballplayers, I’ve got girls.” One player, Evelyn, gets told by her husband that he will not take care of his own son while she is playing baseball, and so she has no choice but to bring the child along with the team. When they’re on the field playing, they’re getting mocked from the sidelines by men hiking their pants up to mimic the dresses. And early on in the season, they’re told that the owners do not want to continue on with the league past one year because the men will be home soon and having both a men’s and a women’s professional baseball league is just not in the country’s interest. All they’re trying to do is play professional baseball in the same way that the men do, and all they’re met with is hurdles and ridicule.

The film takes place in 1943, but here it is in 2019 and we are still facing the same issues when it comes to females in sports.

Growing up, I spent most of my time playing some sport or other, and early on I started to notice the ways that my girls’ teams were treated differently than the boys’ teams. The boys

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went by “Mascot Name,” and the girls went by “Lady Mascot Name.” Even if the mascot wasn’t something that could be a gender, they still had to find a way to make it absolutely sure that everyone knew it was girls playing. In middle school, all the competing schools came together and decided that the weekly Tuesday night games ran too late into the evening and interfered with the children getting a proper night sleep in the middle of the week. The boys’ games during the winter season were moved to Friday night with the added bonus of being an exciting start to the weekend for the whole family. The girls’ games during the fall season were moved to immediately after school on Tuesday so that they wouldn’t be out so late on a school night. Of course, they were now so early that any parents working a traditional 9 to 5 job could no longer attend and support their children.

High school was no different. The boys’ teams got pep rallies and morning announcements and features in the local newspapers. We girls got repeatedly asked, “When does your season start?” despite being already halfway through it. If we wanted to do any weight training or cardio exercise, we had to make sure that it wasn’t when the boys’ team was in there. If there happened to be a pep rally the same day as we had a game, then that game was mentioned as an afterthought. Our high school was built before female students played sports, and so it was built with a baseball field on campus for the boys to play on. The girls’ softball team, on the other hand, had to drive to a field halfway across town for practice and games, a field where most of the school didn’t even know where it was and if they didn’t have a car, they weren’t going anyway.

The hurdles and double standards are not just showing up in films and my own personal experiences. Just as we saw in the “A League of Their Own,” it is not uncommon for sports announcers to refer to female athletes’ marital status as opposed to talking about their skills or accomplishments in the game.

Along with their marital status, their physical appearance is also talked about much more frequently than any athletic ability. The most popular and most recognized female athletes are almost always the ones that are more conventionally attractive while the most talented athletes often get overlooked.

You might say that while the way female athletes are talked about and viewed is not ideal, it’s certainly not enough of an issue to get so worked up about. If these attitudes didn’t have real-world consequences, you may be right, but the consequences are there. The average salary for a professional male athlete is in the millions while professional female athletes might struggle to even make six figures. NBA players can earn millions just from sponsorship deals, while many WNBA players have to spend the off-season playing in other countries as a second job to make ends meet. The MLB is a multibillion-dollar

industry to this day, while the AAGPBL only lasted eleven years before it was shut down.

taking female athletes seriously, these women are getting written off, ridiculed, ignored, cast aside, and have to work twice as hard for less than half the reward. â–

The gender double standards in professional sports have real and lasting effects. From the 1940s to the present day, by not

Illustration by Tavi Veraldi

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Sister-Sister

BY ALYSE MCGUIGAN

S

iblings can be the most enduring relationships you have in your life. They know you before significant others come along. They know life with your parents and life after your parents die. They know you before major successes and failures. It is for these reasons that the relationship between siblings is emotional and complex. I grew up with an older brother, a younger sister, and a younger brother and know all too well that while siblings know how to raise each other up, we also know how to cut each other deeply where it hurts. In “A League of Their Own” (1992), a sister-sister relationship on full display reveals the ways in which siblings support each other while engaging in competition unimportant to everyone but them.

Sisters Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis) and Kit Keller (Lori Petty) are two talented baseball players in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Even before their arrival to the league, their relationship is categorized as Dottie being the star and Kit being the one that needs bailing out by her big sister. The first game in the movie finds Kit striking out after swinging at pitches too high for her to hit followed by Dottie batting in the game winning runs. Dottie tried to tell Kit not to swing, but Kit was adamant in proving her sister wrong. We see a similar situation in a second game a bit later. Kit never failed to complain about her dynamic with Dottie, and it is here that I grew more and more frustrated with the character of Kit. Stop blaming your sister for your problems. You’re the one standing in your own way.

I realized I identified more with the Dottie character because that’s the position I’m in with my own sister. We are less than two years apart in age and are the two middle children of four.

We grew up experiencing life together closely, and since I’m the older sister, I’ve had the benefit of getting to do certain things first and setting the bar. Where did this competition stem from, though? Just as Kit posits in the film, I believe a lot of the comparisons my sister and I make to each other come from our parents and extended family. Humans enjoy grouping like things together so even though my parents compared all four of us to each other, my sister and I were compared more often because we were the girls of the family. We’re all taught during school or in sports that when you perform a certain way it means you are rewarded or given better opportunities, and we’re all used to proximity comparisons: classmates, teammates, and siblings.

Yes, I want my sister to succeed, but I also want to be the star. I think this is true for Dottie and Kit. You never want to see your sibling fail at something, but you do want to be better than her, so what happens when your success means your sibling’s failure?

The scenes where Kit batted under Dottie’s watchful eye were most telling of a sibling dynamic. We see Kit swing at the high pitches a few times during the movie so it was especially satis22

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fying seeing Dottie try to use that against her in the World Series, tempting her with high pitches so she’d strike out. Others players could have picked up on Kit’s affinity for swinging at the high ones, but the fact that it’s Dottie who suggests those pitches cuts more deeply. She knows her sister’s habit and her stubbornness. Dottie knows Kit wants to prove people wrong and will keep trying and failing to hit the ball since she didn’t have success up to that point. What Dottie doesn’t count on is Kit’s breaking point of being compared to her big sister. She finally hits one of the high ones, causing her to become the star and win the game. The reason she hit the ball was that determination to come out from under the shadow of the older sister, a shadow that she never had to be under in the first place. I rooted against Kit winning that final game because I wanted to win. I couldn’t help it. I needed to root for Dottie to win so that I could win. It’s ingrained in me. Must be better, faster, stronger. If I’m identifying with Dottie, I needed her to win the game against Kit who represents my little sister. Sorry, sis. I didn’t want you to fail, but I wanted to win.

Does it really matter that Dottie beat Kit in a race to the farm that started off just as a silly race where one of them started walking faster than the other? No. This moment between two sisters speaks volumes to how unimportant the competition can be from the outside, but when you’re in it, it feels like nothing else matters. Ultimately, it’s not about the results but the experience of getting there. Nobody is around but the two of them during this moment so they’re only competing for each other. They are the only ones who will know the winner and the loser. These little moments add up over a lifetime. Each sibling will secretly keep score and know who’s better at what. Where would Dottie and Kit be without these trivial contests? Maybe they do have some benefit if only to push you a little more than you thought you could handle. I can’t do too many burpees in a row without slowing down, but when I see my sister knocking them out next to me, I find that I can go a little faster for longer than I expected.

When Dottie and Kit come together at the Hall of Fame in the end, it’s not about who won or who lost. As the years go on, siblings compare themselves to each other less and less. One of the reasons for this is that when you start to live apart from each other, you realize that competition isn’t important. As siblings age and start engaging in more relationships outside the family, the negatives in the relationship dissipate, and though the closeness may subside, the emotional attachment remains.

You know what you’ve been through together and how you got there. From the outside, it may look insignificant, but it was the times you spent racing each other home that added up in the end. ■

Pamela Powell Pamela Powell, a member of the CFCA, BFCA, Rotten Tomatoes, and the WFCC, currently writes for both print and online publications, and cohosts a segment on WCIA-TV and WLRW radio. She attends film festivals around the world, including Sundance, SXSW, and Toronto, seeking new blockbusters and hidden independent gems. Pamela participates in panel discussions and local social impact film series and focuses on female filmmakers.

TURN THE PAGE FOR PAMELA’S INTERVIEWS

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Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre on Animal Therapy, Rehabilitation, and Second Chances

BY PAMELA POWELL Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre has written and directed a uniquely evocative and stunning film that reassesses humanity and our need for connection seen through the lens of a hopeless and withdrawn prison inmate who participates in a horse rehabilitation training program. Starring Matthias Schoenaerts and Bruce Dern who give hauntingly emotional performances, Clermont-Tonnerre creates a revelatory film which was the shining star of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and is now available to see in theaters. I had a chance to talk with the writer and director recently. (Edited for space and clarity.)

PAMELA POWELL: Sundance was an integral part of “The Mustang,” but I understand you had another short film, “Rabbit,” that was similar.

LAURE DE CLERMONT-TONNERRE: I was searching and researching about animal therapy in prison. In January 2015 my short was selected for Sundance, but also my first draft of “The Mustang” [was selected for the] screenwriting lab at Sundance; coincidentally, [they] accepted both stories on the same subject. Then I was selected for the directing lab. Through their guidance and expertise, they really helped me to nurture [“The Mustang”].

POWELL: Tell me about transitioning from actress to director as this is your debut.

CLERMONT-TONNERRE: When I started to direct, I didn’t know anything about the techniques. I knew a lot about acting.

I knew how to talk to actors and how to collaborate with them because I grew up in a cinephile family. I was very often on set, observing everyone’s work. I have a lot of empathy for actors.

They’re so vulnerable and so I always make sure I can create a safe space for them to be able to create. That’s really a priority for me.

POWELL: Schoenaerts creates a perfect portrayal of an emotionally hopeless and broken man who has a flicker of life as he connects with this program.

CLERMONT-TONNERRE: We really start in complete darkness to then actually find some light. I needed an actor who had the capacity of the very opaque and mysterious but also could have emotions cracking through the facade. Matthias had that. Matthias has extremely explosive and generous emotions, but he has this very mysterious look. He’s so instinctive, very unpredictable, very surprising physically. [He’s a] closed off and unreadable character who then can find himself through the animal and just connect with the emotions which is [natural].

POWELL: Tell me about working with Bruce Dern, such a talented and seasoned acting veteran.

CLERMONT-TONNERRE: I remember obviously his performance in “Nebraska.” The character [in “The Mustang”] was based on a horse trainer who was a little bit younger. This character is so believing and supporting of this program and these men. To find this father figure—when I sat down with Bruce Dern, he had something so warm and so funny and he said that 24

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this is a great character, but I’m much funnier than him! He had all these jokes and he improvised many of the lines. He tailored the character to himself and sometimes he would just surprise me and he loved that. He would just laugh after every take. It was a very joyful set when he was there.

POWELL: Thomas Smittle is an actual inmate who participated in this program in Nevada and the audience at Sundance loved him!

CLERMONT-TONNERRE: I met him when he was just freshly out of prison where he spent fifteen years. He was working at a rescue sanctuary for horses. He was completely lost after his release from prison, he was trying to figure out how he would make a living being a horse trainer, working with horses.

I wrote this part for him because I was so moved by his charisma. Then I met him again two years later and he was much more confident. We had him and two other inmates from this program where they were working as horse wranglers but also as actors. It was great to have this experienced group of riders coming from ... the same background in prison, learning to ride in NV in prison. It was invaluable as a resource for the others.

POWELL: Technically, tell me about that opening scene where you film the horses being rounded up. Is that real?

CLERMONT-TONNERRE: It was a real one. I knew about this roundup in Utah. I came with a very small crew and had two cameras with two different lenses so we could do wide and medium shots. We couldn’t do close because we weren’t al-

lowed to go closer but we could do an adaptation and capture from a distance what is happening. It was documentary style. It was completely unpredictable.

POWELL: What do you hope the film will accomplish apart from being a deeply thoughtful and entertaining film?

CLERMONT-TONNERRE: I really hope this film will bring awareness of rehabilitation and the idea of a second chance. A lot of men make huge mistakes but still are capable of love and empathy, and as long as they can experience that and they can reflect on themselves, [they can] break the vicious cycle they’ve been a part of. I feel like education is the key. Animal therapy or gardening, there are a lot of therapies that actually exist as programs and they really work. I wish that those programs could be expanded. ■

Gillian Greene on Her Comedy Short “Fanboy” and Finding Humor in Everyday Life

BY PAMELA POWELL Hollywood appears to be ground zero for #MeToo and #TimesUp which has opened the eyes of all and the doors for women, especially in creating director seats. While we still have a long way to go, one woman, Gillian Greene, who’s been a part of Hollywood her entire life, is seated comfortably in that director’s chair and released her short film “Fanboy” via Amazon on March 22. While the film was only meant to demonstrate her skills as a director to get work for feature films, Greene wanted to share this charming comedy about a South Carolina video store employee (Fran Kranz) who dreams of being in Sam Raimi’s sequel to “For Love of the Game” and tries his hand at the Hollywood scene.

The vivacious mother of five who’s husband is Sam Raimi (“Spider-Man”) and is the daughter of the beloved actor Lorne Greene (“Bonanza”) spoke with me recently about making “Fanboy,” her life, and what’s next. (Edited for length and clarity.)

PAMELA POWELL: I was a huge fan of your father’s work.

What was that like to grow up with a famous father?

GILLIAN GREENE: I didn’t know any different. He got a lot of attention. He was revered [and] that always made me feel good. I felt really proud of him.

POWELL: With five kids, tell me about balancing work and home.

GREENE: I met Sam (Raimi) when I was really young and we started having kids right away. I was sort of his silent producing partner so I read all the scripts and went on location and watched all the dailies and [helped with] the casting. I brought my kids on set. That was easy when they were younger. I was there throughout the whole process of every movie so I learned a lot, but if the kids needed me I would be with them.

POWELL: You actually made this forty-minute short before your feature “Murder of a Cat.” What inspired you to make “Fanboy”?

GREENE: I made a short film for Sam (Raimi) and it was with all of his friends. It was a birthday roast and I thought this

was so much fun! Then it inspired me to write the story ... So ultimately, that (“Fanboy”) became my calling card for features.

I don’t really need to release it [but] I had to watch it [again] and thought, “Damn! This is good!” (Laughing) Everyone really likes it and that’s why I’m releasing it now.

POWELL: Tell me about “Fanboy.”

GREENE: Fanboy’s based on a real person named Jeremiah Brennan. He’s an actor and he’s my friend’s boyfriend. He’s a really funny guy and he is that character and ... I was going to cast him, but [he] didn’t find the humor. I had to fire the real Jeremiah! He didn’t talk to me for a year! I said I’ve got to do this for the movie. This is my movie and I’m so, so sorry!

POWELL: That must have been incredibly uncomfortable!

I see that “Fanboy” is your story, but you have two writers who actually wrote the script. Tell me about collaborating with them.

GREENE: I wrote the story and I asked my friends, “Do you know any writers?” [They said,] “Yeah, my friends are writers!” I really liked them and they really liked me and my partner said, “Don’t you think we should really read something they wrote?” I [said] “No, I already know that I like them.” And I just had to say here’s what I want and then they put it in script form.

POWELL: “Fanboy” is funny from start to finish! You use a through line of comedy, especially “Waterworld.”

GREENE: There’s a better joke with “For Love of the Game.”

There’s a sequel because the film was kind of a flop. The whole movie is sort of making fun of everyone. Every day I think I find humor in everything; even in tragedy [there is] levity and humor.

I think that’s life.

POWELL: I see “Caterpillar” is your next feature to direct.

GREENE: It’s about a family, and the mother dies on the night of Halloween and she’s made a costume, a caterpillar costume for her son [who] puts on his caterpillar costume that she made him and he won’t take it off. It’s about how everybody deals with that and this script has a lot of humor in it, too. It sounds really dark, but it’s ultimately about hope and transformation and [it’s] uplifting.

POWELL: As you’ve been immersed in this film industry your entire life, do you see things changing for women?

GREENE: I think the whole #MeToo movement really needed to happen and I think we are being heard right now and we are being given more opportunities. It’s a really great climate right now for women.

Greene is also producing several films which are currently in preproduction, but you can see her calling card, “Fanboy,” right now on Amazon. ■

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Rebecca Stern Combines Her Love for Animals and Filmmaking with “Well Groomed”

BY PAMELA POWELL Rebecca Stern, director of the much-talked-about SXSW film “Well Groomed,” has married her love of animals and her passion, skills, and knowledge of filmmaking to create a visually entertaining film with a compelling underlying narrative arc. Featuring four women who compete in the arena of creative dog grooming, Stern brings us into this relatively unknown world and tells a story of art and friendship.

I recently spoke with Stern, just prior to the festival, and here’s what she had to say. This interview has been edited for clarity and space.

PAMELA POWELL: You went from producing very serious films such as “the bomb” (2016) and “Netizens” (2018) to “Well Groomed” (2019). How did you end up here?

REBECCA STERN: I never had an intent to become a producer, in any capacity; I always thought that I’d become a lawyer. When I graduated school, I moved to NY for a summer and I expected to move right back to CA, But I met the director Matt Heineman while I was in NY. He needed an assistant and so I signed up [and] became his production coordinator on “Cartel Land” (2015). I actually started “Well Groomed” around the same time [as] he was off filming in Mexico City three or four weeks at a time. I wanted to know more about what production was like and I wanted an excuse to spend more time with dogs. It was a good way to marry an old passion which is of pets and animals and a new passion of documentary filmmaking.

POWELL: I’ve never heard of creative and competitive dog grooming until your film!

STERN: I had never heard of it either. I went out to the dog fashion show in Manhattan [and began] doing research into dog cultures and dog trends, into dog care. I only had a lab pit mix in my past so there was no grooming...at all... (laughs) even though maybe there should have been! I quickly found out much more about dog grooming and then ran across the pictures of creative dog grooming online. I thought, “...the pictures are so vibrant and I’d never seen anything like that before.” It’s pretty hard to have that reaction in this day and age.

I met a couple dog publicists who put me in touch on Facebook with Adrian and Angela and Cat who are all in the film, and went out to the dog show in Pasadena in February, in 2015. I made a short film, I think it was eight minutes. I think we filmed one hundred hours for that eight minutes! It was great because it allowed me to get to know them really well. When we went back to do the production for the feature film, I knew exactly what I wanted to focus on... someone who was just starting out in the field as well. As you can see from the film, Adrian, Angela, and Cat are all on the top of their game. I met Nicole [and] she was just so earnest and happy and eager to learn more about this community, to get more involved in it; to find a place where she could express herself even though she was incredibly busy with her new business. Her story is one that’s really close to my heart because it’s one of also starting a new business, which I feel like 26

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it’s often separate from being an artist. She had a lot of challenges around that, and ones that are pretty universal for people who are starting out, especially young people who are doing so.

POWELL: The women have a unique dynamic, perhaps more aligned with only women, to not only compete with one another, but support each other as well.

STERN: That’s so key! Angela and Cat have participated in pilots for reality shows before filming with me and they would always complain because they felt like they were being asked to be pitted against each other. In actuality they spend a lot of time supporting and nurturing each other and answering a lot of questions. One of the things to take out of the film is having friends and getting to know people. I did a very specific focus on that aspect, of their friendships and of the competitions. It isn’t one where they’re trying to push people down, but one where they’re [lifting] people up.

POWELL: What did you take away from the film?

STERN: The film for me and as a young filmmaker is [answering the question] what is art? ... and I was really intrigued by this community of women that was so outside NY or LA or Chicago being artsy, and just the fact that they were getting enjoyment out of it. Shouldn’t you just be able to smile and find joy? I really resonated with that.

Documentary filmmaking is great at highlighting very big and important issues and a lot of my producing work did that, but [in] my directing work I really wanted to find a way to bring more joy into my life and therefore more joy into people who are watching [the film] and to be able to smile with them. ■

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