Mind the Gap
Equal Play
T
W ENTY YEA RS AGO, Zoë Elton, the direc-
tor of programming for the Mill Valley Film Festival, conducted what she describes as “rudimentary research” to discover the number of female directors in the film industry. At the time she came up with somewhere between 5 and 7 percent. So in 2013, when Stacy Smith, a professor and founder of the Inclusion Initiative at the Annenberg School at USC, joined a panel at the Mill Valley Film Festival and revealed that today the number of female directors in Hollywood still hovers somewhere between 5 and 7 percent, Elton had an aha moment. “The lightbulbs just flashed,” she says. “It was stunning to realize that the percentage of women who were being hired as directors in Hollywood hadn’t changed over two decades. Then, of course, you realize they haven’t changed over three decades or four decades. So out of that was born the question: what can we do?” Faced with Stacy Smith’s definitive data about the lack of progress for women in film (made memorable by Frances McDormand’s “inclusion rider” speech at 2018’s Academy Awards), Elton understood that it was time to make gender representation a priority. “We felt it was time to really bring women’s work and parity forward for
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the Mill Valley Film Festival,” she says. “Not to just say, oh yeah, we do this, but to be bold about it and to articulate it in ways that are palpable and tangible and offer inspiration for others.” In 2015, the California Film Institute (CFI) formally launched Mind the Gap at the Mill Valley Film Festival with the intention of addressing the range of issues that affect women in the world of film. In 2017, the festival hosted the first Mind the Gap Summit, a full-day intensive of presentations, classes, networking and conversation around hiring and inclusion. The day before that inaugural event, the Harvey Weinstein story broke and, day by day, painful revelations of other sexual abuse accusations surfaced as the summit and festival took place. “That really set the tone for that first summit,” Elton says. “People’s need for this kind of work, for the connections, for the community and inspiration amongst people who are doing work to forward the causes of gender equity, inclusion and parity — that was really profound.” Then, the next year, the contentious Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings unfolded in parallel timing with the Mind the Gap Summit, further connecting the work of the festival to social realities and to the #MeToo movement. “There’s been this cycle in our lives that has made Mind the Gap so timely and so necessary,” Elton says. In 2018, while attending the Cannes Film Festival, the MVFF team signed a gender equity pledge entitled 50/50 by 2020, publicly committing to the goal of equal representation in programming by the year 2020. The 50/50 by 2020 initiative rose from Hollywood alongside the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements and has gained traction across the globe. Hollywood agencies, including International Creative Management and United Talent Agency, media companies such as VICE media, and major film festivals like Cannes, Venice and Berlin have all signed the pledge. The Mill Valley Film Festival was one of the first U.S. festivals to sign. “We’d already been doing that work so it was really a case of being in solidarity as a worldwide movement,” Elton says. Currently only five other U.S. festivals have committed to the pledge, a fact Elton attributes to the difficulty of achieving parity in a festival lineup that includes Hollywood films. “As soon as we start adding Hollywood films into the mix, our (programming equity)
ISTOCK/SORBETTO
With the industry still dominated by male directors, the MVFF found a way to feature the work of women. BY KIRSTEN JONES NEFF
MARIN MAGAZINE 2019 MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL GUIDE
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