On the opening day of the Toronto International Film Festival, Canadian Unions for Equality on Screen (CUES) released a report on the disparity between men and women in the directors’ chairs in Canada.

Unsurprisingly, the Sept. 8 report by Dr. Amanda Coles, “What’s wrong with this picture? Directors and gender inequality in the Canadian screen-based production industry,” found women directors continue to be overlooked for work on productions in Canada. The report states of domestic and foreign-service production in Canada, men are engaged in upwards of 84% of the available work. As one director-producer explained, the ratio of female to male directors on the studio and network approved lists is “handfuls versus hands full.“

The CUES report is one of many industry reports and initiatives announced as of late that responds to the public outcry surrounding the lack of gender equity behind the camera. And it’s a call that was certainly noticed by TIFF, which this year devoted a significant amount of its industry programming to the issue.

“We wanted to have conversations about subjects that everybody was talking about, that were top of mind, that had a sense of urgency about them,” said Kathleen Drumm, director of industry at TIFF, in an interview with Playback Daily. 

“Women, people of colour are missing out on opportunity and we did very deliberately go about creating a space for those conversations to be had [in our industry programming] and to include as broad a cross-section of the industry as possible to make them feel welcome and to give them opportunity.” 

To do so, the festival organized panels on international initiatives for gender parity in film, screened The 4%: Film’s Gender Problem from director Caroline Suh followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers, and hosted an industry talk with president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Cheryl Boone Isaacs on how her organization can improve diversity and inclusion in its ranks, among other panels on the issue. 

During the 4%: Film’s Gender Problem panel, Dr. Stacy L. Smith, director of the Media, Diversity, and Social Change Initiative at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, spoke about some of her findings on top grossing films in the U.S. “From 2008 to 2015, there were 886 directors attached to 800 films that we examined. Only 4.1% were women,” she said. “Only three of those women were African American or Black, and only one was Asian. Even the industry’s projection of what a female director is is racialized and narrow – even far narrower than that 4% illuminates.”

While panels such as these provide valuable and important information, the danger is that while they provide a platform to talk about issues, they can result in little concrete action. TIFF’s Drumm said the festival actively worked to provide programming that would offer strategies that could be implemented in the real world. “We can’t just have another panel where we all just talk about the problem. That is not the way we’ve approached it. In fact, we really want to say, ‘Here are some great ideas that are working and let’s learn from this,'” she said.

On the Women at the Helm: Because it’s 2016 panel, for example, Sally Caplan, head of production at Screen Australia described how her organization combated a lack of applications for funding from women. With its Gender Matters initiative, Screen Australia virtually removed application requirements altogether. Anyone could apply for its Brilliant Stories stream, for example, so long as they had a female writer, director and protagonist – “and preferably one who doesn’t get raped or chopped up,” Caplan added. The initiative resulted in nearly 500 applications – a record for the agency. As a result 45 projects by women creative teams were funded.

For its part, TIFF also improved the number of women on its panels, increasing from 41% last year, to 55% this year. Its film programming, however, still has a way to go. Of the 397 films programmed this year, 28.5% are from female filmmakers. According to figures provided by TIFF, the percentage of women filmmakers programmed at the fest has increased from 24% in 2015 and around 20% in 2013.

As for the Canadian industry as a whole, a number of major institutions and government agencies have recently announced their commitment to gender equity and diversity. Telefilm Canada recently announced its commitment to develop a more representative feature film portfolio by 2020; in March, the NFB pledged that half of its total production budget would go to projects by women, and in February Women in View and the Directors Guild of Canada announced an initiative to double the number of women directing scripted TV in Canada within two years.

On the Women at the Helm: Because it’s 2016 panel, Telefilm’s executive director Carolle Brabant discussed her agency’s new 2020 goal. “At Telefilm Canada, we’ve been committed to increasing diversity within our portfolio, but it’s clear that we haven’t done enough and we need to do more,” she said.

According to the 2015 Women in View on Screen report, in 2013/2014, Telefilm funded 91 productions, of which 17% were directed by women.

When pushed by fellow panelist Stephen Follows to explain the desired outcomes of the 2020 initiative, Brabant explained that Telefilm would like to achieve similar success to that achieved by its micro-budget program, which, she said, has funded a healthy mix of films by women, Indigenous and diverse filmmakers.

“We created the micro-budget program three years ago with the intention of giving a first opportunity to make a first feature in a less risky environment. The micro-budget program is completely a good representation of gender, of diversity, of Indigenous [populations]. That’s what we’re targeting with our whole portfolio,” she explained.

These top-level initiatives from government bodies, said Tim Southam, national president of the Director’s Guild of Canada (DGC), are necessary to combat the “unacceptable” disparity between men and women in the director’s chair.

“There’s a huge employment equity issue facing the industry, which is simply reflected in the numbers,” he told Playback Daily.

“The hope is that when a cultural body like Telefilm Canada, a state-owned production facility like the National Film Board of Canada or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation make clear statements about their future slates and the gender and cultural representation on those slates, that within a year or two we will see a significant shift in the numbers that we’re looking at right now. So the DGC’s position is ‘let’s look in two years and see if the numbers reflect this intention.'”

Southam added the DGC has also implemented its own initiatives in the meantime. It’s created a committee with the Canadian Media Producers Association to focus on diversity in employment, and it also eliminated criteria for admission for the director’s category at the guild, so long as a director has 75 minutes of exhibited material or a deal memo from an accredited producer. The goal of the initiative is to attract more women and diverse directors into the guild’s ranks and ease barriers to entry. 

“Setting up a paradigm under which the DGC exists not to decide who can direct but rather to defend the creative, economic and workplace rights of anyone who is hired to direct a production in Canada is a very major move forward in terms of embracing much more representative community of directors,” explained Southam.

“Once we have in our ranks members who have a strong interest in employment equity and a diversity of voice in the audiovisual sector,” he said, “that provides us with a mandate beyond simply believing that it’s the right thing to do, we’re pushed by our membership to reflect these values.”

Image: Women at the Helm: Because it’s 2016 panel. Photo courtesy of TIFF.