Why do so few women direct feature films in Canada?

The response to that question is complex, and most industry players aren’t in a hurry to answer it, says Réalisatrices Équitables (Female Directors for Equity), a Quebec-based group which believes the Canadian film industry is shutting out female directors.

Last March, RE released a shocking statistic: today women direct roughly 14% of Quebec features – two percentage points less than in 1985/86. A few weeks ago it sounded the alarm over another startling bit of news: not one of the seven French-language features funded by Telefilm Canada or the nine supported by SODEC in their latest round of picks will be directed by a woman.

Why is it that some of this country’s most well-known fiction writers are female, yet Canadian women just haven’t made their collective mark on the big screen? Why do women tend to be involved in the film industry’s ‘helping’ professions such as publicity, production managing and accounting but are rarely directors or cinematographers?

‘Everyone knows there is a problem. But it’s as if everyone is passing the buck,’ says RE spokeswoman Lucette Lupien, the former head of the Association des réalisateurs et réalisatrices du Québec.

This issue isn’t specific to la belle province. Between 2002 and 2007, Telefilm funded 27 feature film projects directed by women and 181 directed by men. In 2007, a BC Institute of Film Professionals report found that of the 27 independent feature films made in B.C. between 2002 and 2006, only 11% of directors, 11% of editors, and 7% of writers were female.

Yet SODEC and Telefilm maintain that their selection processes are fair. The issue, they say, is that producers aren’t submitting projects with women as directors. Of the 39 proposals SODEC judged last round, only three were directed by women. The number is even smaller at Telefilm – only one female director out of a batch of 43 French-language proposals

In fact, Telefilm chair Michel Roy believes that his institution is exceedingly pro-women. After RE publicly blasted Telefilm and SODEC a few weeks ago, Roy responded that both high-level bureaucrats responsible for funding feature films in French and English are women, and more than three-quarters of the professionals who work for him are female.

‘The conditions are therefore ideal for projects with female crews to be favorably received,’ he wrote in a three-page letter to Lupien.

The director of film and TV production at SODEC, Ann Champoux, agrees with Roy: ‘The problem is not with us. It’s that producers aren’t submitting projects with female directors. Which is strange, because there are so many female producers in Quebec.’

Indeed.

Some of the most high-profile producers in this province are women: Denise Robert (Les invasions barbares), Nicole Robert (Tout est parfait, Québec-Montréal), Fabienne Larouche (Les Bougons, Le piège américain), Lyse Lafontaine (Mama est chez le coiffure) and Kim McGraw (Continental, un film sans fusil, C’est pas moi, je le jure!). Although Lafontaine’s Maman was directed by Léa Pool, for the most part, these women tend to work with male directors.

And as many women as men are graduating from this country’s film schools, says Carol Whiteman, a cofounder of the Banff Centre’s Women in the Director’s Chair Workshop, which began in 1996.

Of the 110 mid-career women who have gone through her program, most have a feature film project they are trying to get off the ground, says Whiteman.

‘Women seem to want to make films,’ she says. ‘The question is what happens to them when they leave school, why is there such a drop-off?’

Whiteman believes that the feature film industry in English Canada is still an old boy network, where producers, even the female ones, tend to hire established names, which are invariably male.

‘It’s about risk management and the bottom line. You want to hire someone who will deliver,’ she says.

Both Lupien and Whiteman speculate that perhaps women aren’t as comfortable playing the ‘aggressive director’ role that is sometimes necessary to get a project off the ground.

They also note that female directors fair much better at places where an outside distributor and producer aren’t necessary to apply for money, such as the National Film Board and the Canada Council for the Arts. At both institutions, women submit more projects and have a solid success rate – 36% to 37% over the period from 2002 to 2007, says an RE study.

Lupien won’t rule out the possibility that SODEC and Telefilm are biased against women. ‘We don’t know. We have to take a closer look at how they pick their projects and why certain ones get made.’

What’s the answer? SODEC’s Champoux believes more research is needed to figure out why producers aren’t submitting more projects directed by women.

Lupien doesn’t rule out the idea of creating production envelopes specifically for women at federal and provincial funding bodies: ‘People are afraid of the word quota, but if Quebecers hadn’t advocated for a French-language branch of the National Film Board, it wouldn’t have happened. That was a quota system. Without it, Quebec cinema probably wouldn’t exist.’