Issue
kate kinninmont mbe In Conversation
(Transcribed by Bridget Bradshaw)
Toby Miller spoke to the Chief Executive of Women in Film and TV in the UK and asked her whether she felt that, among the general audience for films and television in the UK, equality behind the camera is improving? KK: I don’t think the general audience thinks about it to be honest. They might notice the number of actors or actresses on screen but I don’t think they ever stop to think what’s going on behind the camera. There’s no reason for them to think equality has improved and in fact it’s got worse. Women in Film and Television was set up 25 years ago and we’ve all been thinking about what has changed. As you will know in the UK there is a gender pay gap of up to about 20%, the Tory government interestingly are the first government to insist on transparency now, all firms with more than 250 people have now got to publish what they are paying men and women, it’s the only way of naming and shaming and getting rid of the gender pay inequality. Our industry suffers from it badly because we are mainly freelance, that’s one of the things that has made it much more difficult to attain equality. The legislation has been there for many years now. At the same time the film and television industry (and I have lumped them together because a lot of people seem to work across them these days) is one of those areas with massive expansion in training courses, there are 32,000 people who graduate in Film and Media Studies each year but there simply aren’t enough jobs, and I think that’s what leads to the stories you hear of people working unpaid for 2 or 3 years, sofa surfing in London, all sort of desperate to get into an area where most young people want to work in something that is glamorous and interesting, yet because it is a freelance based occupation the salaries have gone down rather than up. (cont’d)
kate kinninmont (cont’d) TM: For the studio systems or the television channel systems, what do they require in terms of an overhaul for equality to happen? People don’t think there’s inequality or that it’s getting worse. KK: I don’t think most people care, they probably think people in film and television are overpaid already, in glamorous jobs, I don’t think audience members would have given it much thought. People in the industry are aware of it, and people are becoming more aware of it in terms of what people in the city are earning. A lot of actresses are speaking out about the great difference in their salary – top leading ladies like Meryl Streep will not get the same sort of money as the top leading man, and she’s one of the biggest old-time movie stars that we’ve had. There is a value guide to leading stars, and of the top paid people none of them are women. TM: Do you think it is part of the problem, that the public are not on side, and not interested in taking up the fight? KK: I think it’s just part of a general culture. The people on screen tend to be well paid, it’s those behind the camera that aren’t. You negotiate a fee when you take the job. When you go right back to the beginnings of film it was very much a female area, just like novel writing in the days of Jane Austen, it was almost a hobby. The very first narrative filmmaking was done by women, like Alice GuyBlaché in France, and that was fine until it started to get bigger and become a business, and moved to Hollywood. As soon as you had people putting money into it, financial speculations, big-time budgets, the women largely disappeared and became casting people, assistants, script supervisors, that kind of thing. There are still quite a lot of issues about gender behind the scenes, for example very few women operate camera on big movies (I think it’s 2.5%), almost all the script supervisors, that’s the continuity people, are women. There’s a company in the UK (Sargent-Disc) who do payroll for all the film companies, and because they oversee all the payroll, they can observe and monitor who gets paid what. We all knew that women generally were paid less in various areas and those were largely areas where men were dominant, but even in areas where women predominate, like costume and wardrobe and makeup, the men were still getting paid at a higher rate. The reason for that – men have an expectation that they’ll get something, they were used to paying women less money and them being quite grateful for it. The companies know if they’re hiring people who do the same job, they know they can get away with paying one more and one less, and that’s where the government stepping in and saying “Right, we’ve got to have pay transparency,” can change that. I think it’s human nature, where they are worried about budgets they will pay people what they can get away with rather than what is a fair amount for the job, because they’re temporary contracts, they’re being squeezed at all levels with the budget and it’s like “I think we could get her for this.” It’s the same way that a lot of young people aren’t paid properly – “He could do that for experience, a couple of films like this, that would look great on his CV, will he do it for nothing?”
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ayanda (cont’d) and the politics of sexual transactions. I think that’s particularly sad. We get so much influence from American film and TV in this country that there are no South African leads that are flawed but in control of their own lives, making decisions in quite a real way. I think it’s something that needs to be remedied. TM: You began your filmmaking career in New York and then, when you returned to South Africa, worked in television, including putting together the a South African version of Who Do You Think You Are?. That particular project seems to me indicative of your feature films, especially AYANDA: in that you seem fascinated by the past, and how it impacts on the present.
“We can’t move forward as a country until we honestly grapple with the past.” SB: Yes, both personally and in terms of my family life. My family comes from Lithuania, where most of them were massacred before and around the Second World War. I’m totally fascinated by the effect that had on later generations. We can’t move forward as a country until we honestly grapple with the past. In a way, that’s the lead character Ayanda’s journey through the film. Her father was killed in quite traumatic circumstances only eight years before. It’s only by revisiting that event through the course of the movie and by understanding how that impacted on her mother, brother and uncle – is she actually able to move forward? I’m totally fascinated by those questions. I’ve now completed my third film this year, an Afrikaans film called DIS EK, ANNA, which is about a young girl who is abused by her stepfather. Abuse is the same sort of thing. When it’s not confronted, the trauma carries over through a person’s entire life and through their children’s lives. TM: We’ve made “AYANDA’ sound a heavy going drama, but it’s as light as a feather when it needs to be – it’s a comedy, a romance. Was it tricky to make sure your film spoke both to South African and international audiences? You’ll want your contemporary view of a lively, growing and vibrant South Africa to be seen by as many people as possible. SB: Absolutely. I think it was better received outside the country, but in retrospect people within the country are starting to look at it now. In some ways it was a little bit ahead of its time. To be honest, I don’t really think about the foreign reception of my films. I really consider myself deeply entwined in South Africa, and I really do try and make films for this country. Sometimes people shy away from them, but what I tried to do with AYANDA was to make a film that wasn’t heavy, to appeal to ordinary young urban Africans who are as comfortable on the streets of London, Paris and New York as they are in Johannesburg. People have in their minds this image of Africa that’s all about pain and violence, diseases and suffering but actually there’s this generation who are very tuned in to what’s going on in the rest of the world. I did want to showcase that in AYANDA.
TOBY MILLER DIRECTOR OF
SPEAKS
TO
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AYANDA
AYANDA is a highly anticipated South African film, directed by Sara Blecher and produced by Real Eyes in association with Leading Lady Productions. AYANDA follows the story of a young Johannesburg Afro-hipster who inherits her late father’s neglected garage and sets about modernising it. The film will screen at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse on 20 October as part of the Cambridge African Film Festival. Toby Miller spoke to Blecher in advance of the film’s UK premiere at the 2015 BFI London Film Festival, on October 10.
SCREENED AT CAMBRIDGE AFRICAN FILM FESTIVAL 2015
character gave her a whole load of new possibilities for her life. So I was very keen to make a film that would do the same thing for African women, give them a role model that presented new possibilities that we don’t normally see on the screen in South Africa.
TM: ‘BLACK GIRL’, which is screening at the Cambridge African Film Festival, is an example of how African film once had a reputation for strong and rounded female characters. Your reaction to JUNO makes me wonder if that equality was vanishing in South African cinema, if female characters Toby Miller: Would I be correct in thinking have become more generic over the last that ‘AYANDA’ partly came from a desire two decades? you had to see a South African film with compelling, flawed and realistic female SB: I think that has happened. I was a judge lead? on the South African Film and TV Awards a couple of years ago and we couldn’t award Sara Blecher: That’s absolutely true. I took for a female lead because there weren’t my teenage daughter to see the Canadian any presented across the whole of South film JUNO, and I remember being African TV. I think most female leads are completely amazed by the transformation ciphers for the male characters or they are that happened in her – because it was consumed with materialism and trading in almost as though watching the Juno looks, (cont’d)
Screened at cambridge film fest 2015
until i lose my breath
UNTIL I LOSE MY BREATH, a bleak story of social hardship, is the feature-length debut of Turkish director-screenwriter Emine Emel Balci. The protagonist, Serap (Esme Madra), is a young girl who works in a lowly position at a garment workshop on the outskirts of an unnamed Turkish city. Working long, hard hours for little pay, she returns home to her sister’s house, to be body searched by her brother-in-law for withheld cash. She dotes on her father, a long-distance lorry driver, but he clearly wishes to be away from her and doesn’t, in the end, repay her desperate affections. Serap’s world is one where everyone needs to do what they need to do to survive, where friendship isn’t given without some kind of compromise. Madra plays her role with sullen conviction, like a kicked dog who doesn’t want to be beaten again. From the first scene, where she searches for her returning father at the haulage depot, we are brought along with Serap on her journey, as the jittery hand-held camera follows close behind. Indeed, the camera never loses sight of Serap, with scene after scene holding her in close up while the background characters are blurred and indistinct. As a means to force audience identification with the character, it’s overplayed, but Madra’s naturalistic performance helps to hold that in check. The main problem with UNTIL I LOSE MY BREATH is that it is unremittingly bleak: from the use of industrial and inner city locations with a blue-grey or bleached colour palette, to the life of its main character. That’s the point perhaps, to show how little possibility of escape there is for Serap. Her resourcefulness helps her to possibly find a way out in the end, but we wonder at what cost – she has to beg, lie and steal to get there. Balci clearly wanted to build a realistic narrative with a strong female protagonist, but she betrays her film school roots in the construction. - Sarah Longfield
REVIEWED BY FEDERICA ROBERTI AT THE BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL:
frame by frame
FRAME BY FRAME analyses the evolution of photojournalism in Afghanistan throughout the complicated history of this country broken by war. After years under the iron vice of the Taliban regime, in which photojournalism was banned and punished by prison or death, this profession started to thrive and expand to conquer credibility, beginning a free press revolution to legitimise it. Set in modern day Afghanistan, FRAME BY FRAME follows four Afghan photojournalists trying to survive in the hostile environment they live in after the foreign troops left their country. With a combination of real footage, old video recordings and interviews with the photographers involved, FRAME BY FRAME shadows Massoud Hossaini, winner of the Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography for one of his pictures, his wife Farzana Wahidy, Wakil Kohasar and Najibullah Musafer. Every one of them is fighting a different battle to win the war against the violent censorship exercise by the Afghan warlords and the current government. The real footage used by directors Alexandra Bombach and Mo Scarpelli is effective in showcasing the adverse conditions in which all this four photographers are working and how much they are achieving in this fight despite the circumstances. Particularly heartbreaking is Farzana’s own battle against the restrictions endorsed by the government to prevent the use of photojournalism to tell the story of many women abused by the chauvinistic Afghan society. Her decision to give to the story of self-mutilation the attention it deserves is commendable, especially because men are not allowed to take pictures of women and she is the only one that can do it. However, her position is even more difficult since a woman that argues and speaks her mind is considered dangerous and in need of control. According to them, a country without photo-memories is a country without identity. FRAME BY FRAME examines how a photo can lead to change and how important it is to have images recorded to build an authentic cultural heritage. According to them, a country without photo-memories is a country without identity. What they desperately want is to give a strong and real voice for the Afghani people. A voice that has been blocked by the Taliban and that is still kept shut by the government that is passively letting powerful people dictate over the citizens. The collection of pictures shown throughout the documentary does not always show the horrors of war, but also the ordinary faces of the Afghani people leaving through the conflict. Even though they have to constantly battle in order to keep working against all odds to capture images, they keep on crusading for this cause because they want to truly represent the essence of the Afghani population that is fighting a civil war against the Taliban. However, even though the reality for these professional photographers is harsh and filled with danger, in the documentary there is also space for hope. This month’s zine cover was designed by Reel Women founding member and programmer Catherine Smith.
©TAKE ONE REEL WOMEN 2015
Cuts
SEE THE PROMO AT THE NEXT REEL WOMEN EVENT!
Whether you wanted an original haircut or to find yourself sitting next to a celebrity, CUTS is where it’s at. Situated in the heart of Soho, London, CUTS is a low-key, world famous hair salon. Diversity of music icons, East End gangsters, actors of stage and screen, homeless people and fashionista’s alike are all considered part of ‘the Cuts Family’. You were only ever an appointment away! This feature length documentary, shot over 19 years, reflects how a day-to-day cutting edge salon went on to nurture a community of creatives who “went in for a haircut, but came out famous”….. and in fact some just ‘came out’. Like the recent Oscar winning movie, Boyhood, ‘Cuts-the movie’ shows society and its values evolve through the people who visit the formidable hair salon, tracing profound and often tragic personal developments within the ‘barbarista’s’ lives and the wider context of immense change in the UK’s political, social and cultural zeitgeist. CUTS was founded during the Post–Punk, New Romantic era in the early 80s, by visionary style setter James Lebon. It began in a tiny stall in the basement of hip Kensington Market, where a heady mix of creative society meshed to form a movement that included contemporary musicians, photographer, artists, DJs, filmmakers, designers and fashion types.
‘Ken market was quite mental , you had all these sort of freak shops like Martin Degville , and lots of characters who worked there , Scarlett, Fat Tony, you had CUTS, it was like a community center for weirdos.’ - Boy George Sarah Lewis is an international filmmaker known for working with the likes of Tony Kaye Films, she produced & directed the documentary Crowded House for Channel 4 as well wrote, directed and edited The Staring Girl; 10 min fiction film which got picked up by many festivals around the world. To raise funds to complete this epic feature length documentary she is launching a crowdfunding campaign with Phundee.com: visit this site to support this great project. https://www.phundee.com/reward/campaign/cuts-the-movie