Writers Guild Awards Show Oscar Momentum for ‘Promising Young Woman’

Anne Thompson

Mar 21, 2021 10:15 pm, Indiewire.com

This year’s Writers Guild Awards were an efficient pre-taped affair (with the two coasts united in one show) perfunctorily hosted by new member Kal Penn. A smattering of Oscar contenders such as Riz Ahmed, Sacha Baron Cohen, Leslie Odom Jr., and Andra Day joined other celebrities from Daveed Diggs to Jimmy Fallon to present this year’s film and television winners. (You can read the full list of winners here.)

Every year, because the WGA always leaves out non-WGA signatories in its award nominations — among them Oscar-contending screenplays — it’s not always as Oscar-predictive as the other Guilds. Last year’s WGA award winners, Taika Waititi (Adapted Screenplay, “Jojo Rabbit”) and Bong Joon Ho (Original Screenplay, “Parasite”) did go on to repeat at the Oscars. Bong won in a category for which Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” wasn’t eligible. (He never joined the WGA.) This year, there were three ineligible movies that weren’t in the running for the WGA Awards: adapted screenplays by Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”), French playwright Florian Zeller and Christopher Hampton (“The Father”), and an original screenplay by Lee Isaac Chung (“Minari”). All three still have shots to win Oscars without any help from the WGA. Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” (October 16, Netflix), which may have peaked when it won the Screenplay Golden Globe, tellingly lost the Critics Choice Original Screenplay award to piping hot “Promising Young Woman” (December 25, Focus Features) from rookie director Emerald Fennell, who appeared gobsmacked to have also won the WGA Original Screenplay prize from her “very bleak writers’ room in England,” she said. WGA members also know Fennell as a television writer (“Killing Eve”); she could go on to win more awards on her home turf at the BAFTAs.

Still, Academy voters often go their own way; several movies won Oscars without WGA wins, including “Green Book,” “BlacKkKlansman,” “Precious,” and “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.” The question, as always, is where the momentum is heading. For the moment, it’s with Fennell.

Beating Kemp Powers’ adaptation of his play “One Night in Miami” (January 8, 2021, Amazon) was Sacha Baron Cohen and his “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” team of eight other writers. “60 percent of the Writers Guild worked on this movie,” said multi-hyphenate and “UK variant” Baron Cohen, who was nominated for the WGA and the Oscar for his first “Borat” 14 years ago. “A film like this is hard to write, based on the behavior of real people who are unpredictable, except for Rudolph Giuliani, who did everything we hoped for.” It’s possible that the PGA-nominated “Borat” sequel ranked just behind the eight Oscar Best Picture nominees.

WGA winners get an extra boost moving toward Oscar voting, which begins April 15 and ends April 20, ahead of the global Oscar show on April 25. The documentary award went to Bryan Fogel’s “The Dissident,” written by Fogel and Mark Munroe, which is not nominated for an Oscar. Fogel said the movie was “for journalists all over the world who seek to make this world a better place.”

Also recognized by the WGA with the Paul Selvin Award (given to a script that “best embodies the spirit of the constitutional and civil rights and liberties which are indispensable to the survival of free writers everywhere”) was WGA and Oscar Original Screenplay nominee “Judas and the Black Messiah,” from writer-director Shaka King and writers Will Berson and Paul Lucas and Keith Lucas. The timely movie about Black Panther Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), who was gunned down by the FBI in 1968,  is“a stirring morality tale and a shocking indictment of what can happen when a government loses its soul,” said presenter Jelani Cobb.

Of course the WGA did not waste the opportunity to lambast WME chief Ari Emanuel. WGA president David Goodman said to look for him “if something happens to me.” This past pandemic year of heated negotiations with the agencies at the end of a three-year battle over packaging fees “has been a tough time. We have a membership that is willing to fight and unite and sacrifice if necessary.”

“Storytelling is more important than ever,” said WGA East president Beau Willimon, “by holding a mirror to society, and confronting pain, bringing joy, and staving off despair with empathy, honesty, and beauty.”

Many writers provided testimonies of support for their guild, repeating the mantra that the WGA had their back. “What the WGA does is connect you and make you feel like you’re part of something bigger,” said film nominee Paul Greengrass (“News of the World”).

The list of motion picture winners is below.

Adapted Screenplay:

“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”
Screenplay by Sacha Baron Cohen & Anthony Hines & Dan Swimer & Peter Baynham & Erica Rivinoja & Dan Mazer & Jena Friedman & Lee Kern, Story by Sacha Baron Cohen & Anthony Hines & Dan Swimer & Nina Pedrad, Based on Characters Created by Sacha Baron Cohen; Amazon Studios

Original Screenplay:

“Promising Young Woman”
Written by Emerald Fennell; Focus Features

Documentary Screenplay:

“The Dissident”
Written by Mark Monroe and Bryan Fogel; Briarcliff Entertainment

Source: https://www.indiewire.com/2021/03/writers-guild-awards-film-analysis-promising-young-woman-oscars-1234625171/

Photo:Anna Pocaro/IndieWire/Shutterstock

‘Self Made’ Co-Showrunner Elle Johnson Calls on Hollywood to Greenlight More Projects About Black Women from American History

Emily Vogel, June 15, 2020 @ 8:56 PM, thewrap.com

Madame C.J. Walker is the OG #GirlBoss, yet not many people know her story. Which is exactly why showrunner Elle Johnson jumped at the opportunity to tell it in Netflix’s “Self Made: Inspired by The Life Of Madam C.J. Walker.” The four-part limited series, starring Octavia Spencer and Tiffany Haddish, follows the unprecedented success story of Madam C.J. Walker, the founder and owner of a hair care empire and America’s first female millionaire.

“As a black woman in America, Madam C.J. Walker is a name I’d always heard about growing up, but I didn’t know very many of the details of her life,” Johnson told WrapWomen. “I was intrigued by the fact that she was born free two years after the Civil War, and that despite all the isms against her – racism and sexism – she didn’t let anything stop her from creating a hair care industry that today is worth billions of dollars,” she explained.

Despite Madam Walker’s epic success, “Self Made” marks the first time a major Hollywood studio has greenlit a project telling her story. Johnson opened up to WrapWomen about working on the groundbreaking series and why Hollywood needs to continue telling stories about black women in America.

Also Read:Why Issa Rae Made a Fictional True-Crime Series About a Missing Black Woman for 'Insecure'

What about Madam C.J. Walker’s story inspired you?

I was personally inspired by how she wouldn’t take no for an answer and that she created opportunities for herself. She didn’t necessarily have someone who looked like her to model her success after, “nevertheless she persisted.” She had to be her own hero and inspiration to keep going.

At one point she had 10,000 people working for her. That blew my mind. I’d never heard of a black woman running a business that large at that time before. The fact that she was also an activist and philanthropist who not only encouraged, but also rewarded her employees when they gave back to the community really made me want to get her story out to a wider audience. In a time when it feels like corporations put profits over people, it’s inspiring to know that Madam C.J. operated under a different paradigm, one that espoused running a successful business that also benefitting her community.

Also Read:Emmanuel Acho, Tika Sumpter on How 'Open Dialogue' Might Combat the Wounds of Racial Injustice (Video)

What was it like working with such an incredible group of women on this project?

Refreshing. Humbling. Liberating. At one point my co-show runner, Janine Sherman Barrois, said this must be what it’s like to have sisters. Mind you she said this after a particularly rough week of let’s call them “heated discussions.” What I realized was that we were able to be ourselves – to not apologize or stifle or take a step back — but to bring all our passion, including disagreements and differences of opinion, to the project and still feel deeply connected to the material. And to each other. At the end of the day we had each other’s backs. We were all working for the common goal of making this project a success. Contrary to what you might think, that didn’t mean checking our egos but making sure everybody was bringing their full, complicated selves with all that swagger to the table for the benefit of telling this story. I love that about this group of women — that when we came to work we could show up as our authentic real selves and give it everything.

What message do you hope your series sends to the industry?

I hope that people in the industry will look at “Self Made” and not only be inspired and personally moved but realize that it’s a good business decision to tell stories about Black women. I hope they see that it can be done on a budget and in an engaging and binge-able way that’s relevant to contemporary audiences.

Meet the UCLA Professor With the MEANS to Diversify Hollywood

For six years, UCLA sociologist Darnell Hunt and co-author Ana-Christina Ramon have studied Hollywood’s lack of representation with the annual Hollywood Diversity Report. Hunt says that what seems like an overwhelming problem in the film industry can be addressed with a series of changes represented by the abbreviation MEANS. 

Hunt has been inundated with news media requests lately thanks to Hollywood’s renewed focus on improving black representation, sparked by the Black Lives Matter demonstrations nationwide. His hope is that the latest calls for diversity won’t be more talk with no action.

“This is an important moment in history, where people are making it known in very impassioned ways that business as usual can’t continue,” Hunt told MovieMaker. “I think that that should be a call to Hollywood that business as usual can’t continue there, either. Because a lot of the stories that they tell — the images they circulate — affect the way people see the world. It’s not just entertainment.

“If they’re telling stories and circulating images that aren’t inclusive in terms of the writers and directors and even the executives who are greenlighting projects, then they’re complicit with the structural racism that underlies all the unrest we see right now.”

Read Also: How the Black Lives Matter Movement Is Already Affecting Films

Racist images in Hollywood are as old as Hollywood itself. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of A Nation, released more than a century ago, presented the Klu Klux Klan as heroes. Hattie McDaniel became the first black woman to win an Oscar for playing a slave, and no other black actor won for another 24 years. We all know the clichés through Hollywood history: black characters who always die first, “magical Negroes,” criminals.

Portrayals of black people have become more multidimensional in recent years given awareness campaigns like #OscarsSoWhite, massive hits like Black Panther and Get Out, Moonlight winning Best Picture, and more black filmmakers finally telling their stories. But those successes don’t mean representation has been achieved. Hunt sees MEANS as a way toward permanent improvements.

The first letter in MEANS stands for “modernize your world view,” Hunt says. Change towards diversity will only happen if everyone is on board, especially decision-makers.

Hunt says the lack of diversity is appalling. “I’ve visited studios, networks, and outside of the assistance, there wasn’t a single person of color on multiple floors,” said Hunt. “And yet they’re telling stories and making movies and TV shows that in some cases, have people of color as stars, and this, that, and the other. It’s almost as if there are two different worlds in terms of who’s telling the stories and making decisions and who’s on the screen. That’s just not acceptable.”

He adds that people at the top of organizations must make it clear to all employees that America is “more than 40% people of color now.”

“We’ll be a majority minority country in a few decades,” he said. “You cannot continue to do business and expect to be profitable and certainly not serve the needs of your audience if you have a workforce that looks nothing like America.”

The next letter, E, stands for “Expand the net,” which means that people at the top need to be “expanding the net of possibilities” when hiring candidates for a position.

“You have Black Panther, you have Get Out, you have all these other movies that are diverse and do extremely well both domestically and internationally. But most movies that are made today still don’t sort of align with where we’re going as a nation, and they’re still making a lot of movies that aren’t very diverse at all.”

Hunt’s research has found that diverse films make more money, though Hollywood executives are still resistant to them.

“If you have a producer, he wants to work with other producers that he — usually he — has worked with before — hire writers that they worked with before. And of course, if you’re starting from an industry that’s largely dominated by whites, you’re more often than not going to hire another white, and you kind of reproduce the same population of people who have been working in the industry before. It becomes very hard to break that vicious cycle and for people of color and women to kind of get in, in meaningful ways.”

The A in MEANS stands for “amplify women,” because his research has found that productions led by women, especially women of color, are usually more diverse.

“One easy way to quickly kind of make differences is to just really really double down on bringing in women as directors and executives and decision makers because then the whole room around them tends to look different.”

“N” stands for “normalize compensation practices.” Hunt says that companies should pay interns so that people who can not afford to work without pay can get a foot into the business.

“Hollywood kind of sees itself as this glamorous place where your privilege can work here. So therefore, you should start out in the mail room or you should intern for no pay and work your way up,” said Hunt. “Well, that works for people who come from privileged families. You know, if your parents can pay your rent and subsidize you while you’re working for free. But people of color can’t do that. They don’t tend to come from those types of families.”

He added: “Many talented people color who could have come into the industry and made huge contributions pursue other types of careers where they’re paid appropriately from the beginning. So compensation needs to be thought of as paying people their worth. And thinking about what the people are contributing as crucial to the bottom line of the industry. You know it’s in your interest to bring these people in. You’re not doing them a favor. They’re doing you a favor because they’re helping your work force align more with where your audience is.”

S stands for “Structure incentives,” which means compensating people based on “how well they’ve done in terms of diversifying the workforce.” He also said local governments should give tax incentives to productions based on how well they meet diversity standards.

The momentum of the past few weeks has inspired many people to advocate for change, and MEANS gives the concrete steps those in the film industry can take to meet what is now expected of them. As Hunt says, “This is an opportunity — a golden opportunity — for Hollywood to look at itself in the mirror and to ask, Are we are doing business the way we should be doing it? And the answer is clearly ‘no.’” 

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‘Look Up Here!’: 5 Female Directors Reject the Male Gaze

International Women’s Day arrives Sunday on the heels of another season of #OscarSoMale and another prize for the director Roman Polanski, who fled the United States in 1978, after he was convicted of unlawful sex with a minor.

And yet, there are bright spots. “I went to see ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ yesterday,” said the filmmaker and CalArts film professor Nina Menkes, “and there were trailers for three other films by women. It’s impossible! It’s the first time anything like this has happened in my life.”

Menkes is the creator of “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression,” a lecture and clip show she has been staging at film festivals around the world. In it, she uses scenes ranging from Hitchcock’s 1946 “Notorious” (1946) to Sofia Coppola’s 2003 “Lost in Translation” (with its opening shot of Scarlett Johansson’s barely clad backside) to demonstrate the nuances of objectification, the male gaze and how it’s perpetuated.

And not just by men. “I’ve had women students come in and show footage that begins on the woman character’s face,” Menkes said, “then for no apparent reason it cuts down to her low-cut shirt. And goes lower. And then back up. And I’d say, ‘Why did you film that way?’ And there’d be this deer-in-the-headlights look. They were doing what they’d seen a million times. And weren’t even aware of it. Heterosexual male actors are almost never filmed that way.”

Right now there’s a surge in cinema made by women — not just “Portrait,” but also recent and forthcoming movies like “Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey,” “The Assistant,” “Lost Girls,” “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” “Zola” and Menkes’s documentary “Brainwashed.” I spoke to the directors to find out how they have been incorporating Menkes’s lessons into their work.

Garbus, a veteran documentarian, is making her narrative feature debut with a drama (due March 13) about the case of unsolved serial killings on Long Island. She tells her story through one victim’s mother, played by Amy Ryan and based on the real-life Mari Gilbert.

Given that the dead women were involved in sex work, Garbus said, a male director might have approached things differently. “But the point of view of my protagonist, her subjectivity, informed the shooting almost entirely. In the scenes with her family, we would break her off and put her at a distance, but in terms of her walking into a man’s world — which is everywhere apart from her family — that informed everything.” Mari is never scrutinized by the police, for instance, and their disregard for the killings is read through her. “This is about making women’s voices heard, so it’s ingrained in the entire movie.”

The perspective does shift in a sequence involving a retirement party for a detective named Dormer (Gabriel Byrne). “The cops call strippers to the party and there was an opportunity to objectify a lot of beautiful women,” Garbus said. “But that scene is told through his point of view, which involved a growing sense of alienation and disgust with his colleagues. It’s one of the few scenes not anchored by Mari’s perspective, but Dormer is coming to a realization, and is looking at his colleagues in a different way.”

In this recent follow-up to “Suicide Squad” focusing on Margot Robbie’s antiheroine Harley Quinn, there’s a moment when a Gotham billionaire (Ewan McGregor) forces a woman to get on a table and strip. “We were pretty conscious not to muddy what the scene was meant to be about, by not offering anything remotely vulnerable or titillating,” Yan said. “There are choices like that which felt very deliberate; we were making sure we were protecting our female actors, even in a scene that was about humiliation.” But she said other choices were more intuitive: “It was less, ‘I’m going to unpack and reject the male gaze of every director who’s come before me’ and more of an unconscious, innate reaction about what feels right.” All the while keeping the camera on her actors’ faces. “That’s where you tell the story,” Yan said. “‘Look up here! I’m talking to you!’”

“Zola,” which recently debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and is set for a summer release, is based on a notorious Twitter thread about a waitress and a stripper on a real-life road trip. It’s told from the server’s perspective, Bravo said, but “takes place inside of sex work. I wanted it the moment I read it. No one was going to protect this narrative like I would.”

Bravo said she did her homework: “Most of what was out there that dealt in this space was prescribing to a male audience. By men, for men. I made what I wanted to see. I know what a breast looks like. I have a vagina. I didn’t feel I needed to add more to what is already a strong library of these images.”

Female filmmakers are working to reclaim their point of view, Hittman argued. She does that in her new drama, opening March 13, by studying the faces of her lead characters: a young Pennsylvania woman (Sidney Flanigan) trying to obtain a legal abortion in New York City with the help of her cousin, Skylar (Talia Ryder). The exception to that focus is a scene in which Skylar is about to roll a bowling ball down an alley and the camera — shifting to the perspective of a guy they’ve met on the bus — follows her longingly. “That’s the one point where the movie plays with the male point of view. You’re supposed to see him watching and desiring.” But that one moment is a long way from some of Menkes’ favorite examples of gratuitous voyeurism, like the naked locker-room romp at the start of “Carrie.”“I do think there is a systematized approach to making a studio film in terms of the expectations of how a film is shot and edited,” Hittman said. “But I do think there’s room within that to control the points of view of the film.”

Green’s film, released in January, was directly inspired by the Weinstein saga. “It’s told from the perspective of the youngest female at a production company, the person with the least amount of power at that company,” she said. Outside the office of a predatory executive (who remains offscreen), the woman (Julia Garner) watches as other women go in and out of his office, but, Green said, “I was very careful not to linger or zoom or do close-ups of their bodies, but rather see them the way a young woman would see them, without leaning into any of those traditional tropes of the male gaze, seeing them as objects and not human beings.”

The obvious comparison is with “Bombshell,” the Jay Roach-directed tale of past sexual exploitation at Fox News, but it has been accused by some of being exploitative itself, as in a scene when the camera is trained on a female character hiking up her skirt at the behest of a man. “With something like ‘Bombshell,’ the problem is at the scriptwriting level,” Green said, “where they’ve seized on the most scandalous and sensational aspects of a story and ignored the structures and systems in which these behaviors are embedded. Perhaps they’re blind to it because they’re unwittingly participating in it. As women we’re more aware of the broader points.” Among them: “Just getting rid of Harvey Weinstein isn’t going to fix the problems.”

Photo: Jessica Kourkounis/Netflix; Anna Kooris/A24; Claudette Barius/DC Comics and Warner Bros.

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In Harley Quinn’s World, Women Get Angry

“I’m here to report a terrible crime,” purrs Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), eyes twinkling mischievously behind her oversized sunglasses as she saunters up to the front desk of a police station. The bored officer looks up at her and says, “And what terrible crime is that?” She opens her trench coat to reveal a bandolier of (non-lethal) ammunition and pulls out her Fun Gun, taking aim at the officer’s forehead before he can even process what’s happening. “This one!” Harley grins as she fires a red rock that shatters his glasses and knocks him out on impact. Fighting her way through the rest of the station with ease, she leaves a trail of unconscious cops, red and blue smoke and glitter confetti in her wake. The scene is chaotic, beautiful and fun.

Watching Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey was a serendipitous and cathartic experience for me. It happened to premiere on the night that marked five years since I’d survived my co-worker sexually assaulting me, so seeing a group of women fight back against violently entitled men and the institutions that enable them was especially poignant. I couldn’t help but marvel at how they never hesitated to listen to their emotions, channelling their righteous anger into protecting themselves and an innocent child from harm. Directed by Cathy Yan and produced by Robbie herself, Birds of Prey presents a world where women have agency and therefore humanity, where their emotions are normalized and not repressed.

Emotions are a natural human instinct that help us engage with our environment. Yet for women, especially those who hold multiple marginalized identities, our emotions are often weaponized against us. In her 2018 book, Rage Becomes Her, author Soraya Chemaly connects the ongoing subjugation of women to how our culture polices our emotions. Women are expected to vocalize their displeasure with sadness, a “retreat” emotion associated with submissiveness. We’re punished for expressing anger and taught that doing so is unbecoming and shameful. “Anger is often a response to a boundary crossing,” Farzana Doctor, a Toronto-based psychotherapist, tells FLARE via email. “It [shows] us that an injustice has happened that we must respond to.” If anger is the emotion that helps us identify injustice and enforce our boundaries, it makes sense that the dominant culture would demand that we silence ours.

In Harley Quinn’s world, however, we see what it looks like when women are allowed to express their emotions without shame. The film begins with Harley openly mourning the end of her abusive and co-dependent relationship with the Joker following the events of Suicide Squad. It was refreshing to see her give herself the space to express and move through her grief without the script coding her as hysterical. In processing the breakup, she comes to resent him, not just for breaking up with her but for how poorly he treated her throughout their relationship.

Read this next: I Can’t Stop Thinking About Captain Marvel’s Trauma

Harley thus embarks on a quest to “become her own woman,” publicly emancipating herself from her identity as the Joker’s girlfriend. This makes her vulnerable to the wrath of several Gotham criminals, who set out to kill her in the first act of the film. Thankfully, her healthy relationship with her emotions allows her to fight her aggressors with ease, effectively taking out groups of men twice her size with nothing but her body and resourcefulness. By the end of the film, Harley becomes a better person who no longer needs the senseless violence of men to protect her.

Along her journey, Harley becomes acquainted with Dinah Lance, aka Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), a singer with a beautiful and supernaturally lethal voice. We first meet Dinah performing at Black Mask, a club belonging to Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor). Through her performance, she expresses obvious resentment towards him, but she holds herself back from acting on those feelings. She declines to be Detective Renee Montoya’s (Rosie Perez) mole within Roman’s organization, seemingly grateful that he had taken her off the street. But once she’s promoted from singer to Roman’s personal driver, becoming more involved with his criminal activity, she’s increasingly repulsed by his violent and abusive tendencies.

“Most Black women and women of colour are taught that anger is equivalent to disrespect,” says therapist Dr. Kelsei LeAnn, who’s based in Houston. So it’s not surprising that Dinah initially stifles her anger, like too many racialized women do to survive in real life. But by denying our anger a healthy outlet, says LeAnn, we sell ourselves short of our full potential. It isn’t until Dinah fully realizes her anger at Roman and his henchmen and she needs to protect young Cassandra Cain (Ella Basco) from harm that she demonstrates the power of her supernatural vocals. As a result, she bonds with Harley and the other women, finding her community and a sense of purpose by the end of the film.

Harley and Dinah are later joined by the Huntress, Helena Bertinelli (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Helena was traumatized at a young age after surviving a rival gang violently slaughtering her entire family. After going into hiding, she spent 15 years training under assassins so that she could eventually hold the men who robbed her of her childhood accountable. Helena’s anger is a direct response to her childhood trauma, and it was satisfying to see her express that rage without facing shame or ostracization for it.

Read this next: The Disturbingly Long List of All the Women Who Have Accused Harvey Weinstein

Cleveland-based psychologist and author Dr. Tyffani Dent describes anger as an “externalizing emotion” that allows us to direct our righteous rage outwards at the systems and people who oppress us. From the moment of her trauma, Helena was encouraged to act on her anger instead of being expected to silence and ignore it. By having the space to express her rage, she was able to process her trauma in a healthy way. I was particularly moved to see that she still retained her sense of empathy and humanity through her extreme hardships, going out of her way to protect Cassandra during the fight at the fun house. Helena acts on her aggression with deliberate clarity, directing it only at the men who deserve her wrath while using it to protect herself and her newfound friends.

Between Harley breaking free of her abusive relationship, Dinah finally embracing her supernatural powers and Helena unabashedly seeking justice for her trauma, I felt empowered walking out of the theatre. After years of reading about rape culture, I now know that anger is a natural and justified reaction to trauma. But in the aftermath of my assault five years ago, I saw my rage as a liability and tried to repress it; I feared that people would perceive me as irrational or vengeful and dismiss any attempt to hold my abuser accountable. Internalizing my anger, however, ultimately harmed me more than it helped. Without a healthy outlet, that rage festered into depression, which held me back from standing up for myself when I was deeply wronged. It wasn’t until I gave myself permission to express my anger that I could truly put my full strength into fighting for the justice I deserved. At the end of Birds of Prey, I wondered what my journey as a trauma survivor would have been like had I known that I should leverage my anger instead of stifling it.

Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey is, yes, a fun, campy comic book movie, but it’s one that illustrates a beautiful message on how emotions make women more powerful. Expressing and acting on their anger is how Harley and company outsmart and overpower the top crime lord in Gotham and an army of his henchmen. The film demonstrates that healthy rage is a force for good that can help us fight against injustice and oppression, a catalyst for radical change and growth on a personal and systemic level. Our anger isn’t something to fear or be ashamed of—it’s simply part of being human. Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey calls on us to change the way we perceive women who express their full range of emotions. Beautiful things are possible when we fully embrace our humanity.

Photo: Warner Bros.

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Berlin 2020 Empowered Women Directors and Hinted at a Better Future for Europe’s Film Festivals

As the entire film industry reacted to images of convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein being led to jail in handcuffs, women at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival had much to celebrate. This year’s program, under the new leadership of Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, continued the trend among European festivals reaching for gender parity in its programming, with six films directed by women in the main Competition — many of them gaining upbeat reviews and global buyer interest — as well as many other strong stories by and about women throughout the sprawling Berlinale selection.

Here are some of the biggest takeaways from the progress in this year’s lineup.

1. “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” broke out at the festival.

Brooklyn filmmaker Eliza Hittman found out that her third feature had been accepted in the Berlinale competition a month before Sundance in January, where her film won a special jury prize for “neorealism.” The teenage abortion drama (which Focus Features picked up before production and will release stateside on March 13) also played well in Berlin, shooting to the top of Screen’s critics chart, moving ahead of Christian Petzold’s watery romance, “Undine.”

“Never Rarely Sometimes Always” is considered a strong candidate for the Golden Bear, even given the political views of the Berlinale jury president, Jeremy Irons, who distanced himself from past anti-abortion statements at the opening day jury press conference. (Other jurors include “The Artist” star Berenice Bejo and “Manchester By the Sea” writer-director Kenneth Lonergan.)

“I don’t think I make crowd-pleasing Grand Jury Prize movies,” Hittman told me ahead of the premiere. “Everything I do is a little off to the side. I didn’t come here with any expectations. Juries are always wildly unpredictable. I did not make the movie to preach to the choir either. This is an art film, but I knew at some point we would be met with people with different ideas about women’s reproductive rights. I didn’t expect it to be the head of the Berlinale jury!”

Eliza Hittman, Sidney Flanigan, and Talia Ryder arrive for the premiere of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” during the 70th annual Berlin International Film Festival

Hittman wanted to pursue the story of a young girl traveling to get an abortion soon after her first film, the micro-budget romance “It Felt Like Love,” but it was hard to find financing, and she moved on to make Sundance directing prize-winner “Beach Rats.” “It’s not been easy,” she said. “I’m an outlier. I’m not in the studio system. I’m still making work very much in my voice.”

For women directors making their way in the film industry, “it’s a step forward and a step backwards,” she said. “There is not a simple answer. Unfortunately, Academy voters can’t recognize that women are directors. [Hittman is a member of the Writers branch.] We have to tear down the patriarchy! It’s an issue not just for the Academy — they are in the public eye, more people are watching. It’s film schools. Other people get away with what they get way with because there’s no transparency about their policies. Things can change.”

One thing Hittman believes in is 50/50 film sets. “Because of the content, the movie naturally attracted a predominantly female production team,” she said. “But we can’t over-correct the problem. You end up with the same issues as an all-male set. A 50/50 balance is very holistic.”

As for the Weinstein verdict, Hittman was disappointed that he wasn’t convicted on all counts. “It unfortunately diminishes the enormity of the accusation,” she said. “The [possible] sentence of five to 25 seems too thin.” The limping mogul soon wound up in a New York hospital before heading to Rikers and his sentencing on March 11. “He’s milking it,” Hittman said. “It’s a bad performance and he should know it.”

2. Other strong films directed by women broke out at the Berlinale.

“The Intruder”

Argentinian competition film “The Intruder” (“El Profugo”) marks the breakout of an exciting director, Natalia Meta, who on her second go-round adapted a genre novel about a choir singer and voice actress (Érica Rivas of “Wild Tales”) who starts to lose her voice after a traumatic loss. “What really attracted me to this novel wasn’t presenting this genre in terms of the good and the bad,” said Meta at the press conference. “It was breaking the mold. I could get into this world. It’s about dreams and wakefulness, fiction, fact and truth.”

The movie plays metaphorically with the ways men control women by getting inside their heads, moving fluidly between reality and dreamscape, not unlike “Black Swan.” “This is linked to a new feminist wave, that is being felt in the countries where we come from,” said Rivas. “And that it is also important, that things aren’t just set in stone. And that there’s a malleability, something soft in-between, that can be the focus of a story.”

Oscar-nominated Polish director Agnieszka Holland (“Europa, Europa”) returned to the Berlinale one year after “Mr. Jones” with another period biopic, “Charlatan,” in the Berlinale Special section. (It could have played in Competition.) This time the subject is dour Czech herb healer Jan Mikolášek (Ivan Trojan), who gets into trouble with authorities through three government regimes for using medicinal plants to heal patients. Later in his own popular healing practice, he’s attracted to his charismatic assistant Frantisek Palko, well-played by Juraj Loj. This sweeping but intimate epic explores the dark side of Mikolášek’s struggle to balance his conscience and his calling.

British director Sally Potter offered one of the starriest lineups at the Berlinale, “The Roads Not Taken” (Bleecker Street), starring Javier Bardem as Leo, a New York writer wrestling with dementia whose mind explores his past lives (Salma Hayek plays his first wife, Laura Linney his second) as his daughter Molly (Elle Fanning) tries to keep him from flinging himself out of taxis and meandering alone into traffic in his bare feet. Potter delivers a handsome film on a low budget, but her aging father-caretaker daughter story is not as compelling as Sundance debut “The Father” (Sony Pictures Classics), starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman.

Three other well-reviewed American entries directed by women at the Berlinale were Sundance hits “First Cow,” a western from Kelly Reichardt which played well in Competition following its Telluride premiere, Josephine Decker’s Sundance carryover “Shirley,” starring Elisabeth Moss as horror novelist Shirley Jackson, which won raves out of the Encounters section, and Kitty Green’s Harvey Weinstein-inspired sexual harassment drama “The Assistant,” in Panorama, which already opened in the U.S. “I had 10 years when I couldn’t get a movie made,” Reichardt recently told Senses of Cinema. “It had a lot to do with being a woman.”

French Sundance World Cinema directing award-winner Maïmouna Doucouré’s “Cuties” (“Mignonnes”) was picked up by Netflix and played the Generations sidebar at the packed Zoo Palast. “The movie asks, ‘how do you become a woman in our society?’” Doucouré said at the film’s Q&A. Her well-researched script follows a Senegalese pre-adolescent (Fathia Youssouf) in Paris who rejects her culture’s rigid rules in order to dance sexy with “The Cuties.” Doucouré defended the degree to which the movie leans heavily on pre-teens shaking their booty, saying: “I must show reality.” Several festival programmers complained that while Netflix may book their content into a handful of top festivals, they often won’t play any others.

Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez’s surprising Berlinale Special documentary “American Sector” tracks various pieces of the Berlin Wall in the United States. Like “Faces Places,”  the filmmakers opportunistically put ordinary people in front of the camera to explain what these fragments mean to them with unexpectedly entertaining — and sometimes disturbing or even moving — results.

3. Nina Hoss and Paula Beer are major German stars.

Petzold’s atmospheric romantic fantasy “Undine” stars his two leads from “Transit,” Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer, who commands the screen with extraordinary poise for a 24-year-old, and has already starred in a French film from Francois Ozon (“Frantz”). She carries the title role of a mysterious woman who feels compelled, per mermaid mythology, to kill her lover Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) when he dumps her. Rogowski is industrial diver Christoph, who feels unsettled by his new girlfriend. Picked up stateside by IFC, “Undine” proves that Beer could go far.

Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond’s Swiss family drama “My Little Sister” is also likely to win an American buyer. The film involves a pair of twins, Sven, a famous theater actor (Lars Eidinger) fighting cancer, and his playwright sister Lisa (Nina Hoss of “Barbara,” “Phoenix” and “Homeland” fame), who takes on his convalescence when her mother (a hilarious Marthe Keller) clearly can’t manage. Lisa struggles with trying to save her brother as well as her marriage to a controlling husband (Jens Albinus) as they raise two kids. Hoss gives a towering, intimate, awards-worthy performance.

4. The 50/50 movement will not end in 2020.

The EFM and the Swedish Institute hosted a seminar called “50/50 — A Roadmap for the Future” moderated by Wendy Mitchell that featured “one of the rock stars of gender equality,” she said, Anna Serner, CEO of the Swedish Film Institute, who launched the 50/50 by 2020 initiative in Cannes in 2013 and insists the movement is far from over. “I am not afraid of quotas,” she joked, as she was able to insist on equal treatment for women filmmakers in Sweden, but has been fighting blowback from the white male establishment. And now more countries are taking the pledge, she said, adding: “Failure is not an option.”

Serner cited Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, Patricia Arquette, and Emma Watson as among the red carpet women who have carried the gender equality banner forward in Hollywood. “These questions of who gets the big awards and who gets the money is something everyone is working on,” Serner said.

Dame Heather Rabbatts DBE is leading the charge in Britain as chair of Time’s Up U.K. “We are trying to align strategies globally and reshape the ecology of making films,” she said, “with more women directors and more diverse crews. Studios have adopted sexual harassment guidelines, and young actors are getting intimacy training. It’s all about shifting the culture. Harvey Weinstein is not the end of this [equality] issue. It’s not about win or lose. This movement is not going back in the box.”

And 50/50 for white women is not enough: fighting for equality for people of color and the LGBTQ community is also important as the movement expands. “People ask me, should we have a women’s award? Should we have a people of color award? No! Should we have a white men award?” Rabbatts said. “We have to look at who’s defining the other. We are not the other; we’re here.”

There is considerable progress being made. On the awards front, the Oscars are increasing the diversity of their voters, and both the BAFTA and Cesar Awards are under fire and cleaning house. On the film festival side, Sundance under Kim Yutani is more diverse than ever, while Cannes has more transparency and a majority of women on its selection committee (though still run by director Thierry Fremaux), and the Berlinale is certainly more open to women filmmakers.

“It’s the same bubble of people going to every festival,” said Serner, “and they are all agreeing on what is considered quality and what is not. You need to change the people and power, so that you can realize that others do find quality in other kinds of stories and expressions.”

IndieWire asked the two new festival heads how they are going about achieving gender equality in their program. “First of all, the industry is changing and looking more at women who make movies,” Rissenbeek said. “You can choose the films made by women making movies. But it’s a process.”

Chatrian agreed that change has to come slowly, with standards in place, and no quotas in terms of selection. “Then I’d be creating subsections: ‘I need nine films by women and I have to fill that,’ no matter the quality,” he said. “The quota of the 50/50 is for me a place that I want to reach, but it doesn’t have to be an obligation. Otherwise, the quality of the films will suffer and therefore the films will suffer. Of course we have to do better work of scouting and research.”

Photo: CLEMENS BILAN/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

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Spike Jonze Lists Female Cinematographers He Wants to Work With in the Future

Spike Jonze has joined forces with Free The Work to create a video playlist listing the women cinematographers he wants to work with in the future. Jonze has worked with several female DPs in the past, including Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Zoë White, Mego Lin, and Ellen Kuras. While all four of the director’s feature films have been shot by men (Lance Acord handled Jonze’s first three features and Hoyte van Hoytema stepped in for “Her”), Jonze has collaborated with White, Lin, and Kuras on various advertisements. Kuras worked with Jonze on his famous 2006 Adidas commercial.

As for the women cinematographers Jonze is eyeing for the future, the director’s wish list includes Natasha Braier (“The Rover,” “The Neon Demon,” “Honey Boy”), Daisy Zhou (check out her Nike Vogue commercial), Rina Yang (the cinematographer behind Sephora’s “We Belong to Something Beautiful” advertisement), Maryse Alberti (“Velvet Goldmine,” “The Wrestler,” “Creed”), and Polly Morgan (“The Intervention,” “Lucy in the Sky,” “A Quiet Place: Part II”).

Jonze has yet to announce any narrative feature follow-ups to “Her,” but his next movie is a Beastie Boys documentary that will be released in IMAX and on Apple TV+ in April. The documentary, titled “Beastie Boys Story,” was shot by Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who earned great acclaim on films such as “Palo Alto,” “Teen Spirit,” and “The Sun Is Also a Star.” The documentary will have a limited IMAX engagement beginning April, followed by a global Apple TV+ launch on April 24.

Photo ; Shutterstock

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'Diversity is now centre stage': Berlin film festival sets industry precedent

The Berlin film festival has achieved gender parity in some of its most senior positions a year after signing a pledge that commits film festivals to improve representation in relation to diversity.

The Berlin festival, which opened on Thursday, is one of the major events to sign up to 5050x2020, which requires organisations to release information about the gender and race of their directors, members of selection committees and executive boards, and to record similar data about the directors, casts and crews of submitted films.

The release of Berlin’s diversity data showed that its festival directorships were shared equally between men and women, and that its executive board was similarly balanced, but that the majority of films shown at the competition were still made by male directors.

At this year’s festival, 37.9% of films were directed by women, and six of the 18 films in competition were directed by women, which is down from seven last year. This follows Sundance in January, when the festival presented its most diverse lineup ever.

The Berlin data is released as the chair of Time’s Up UK called for more transparency on gender from film festivals and awards bodies. Dame Heather Rabbatts welcomed the progress at Berlin but recalled the dismay at last year’s Venice festival, where there were only two films in competition by female directors. “Progress is bound to be lumpy, it’s not going to be a wonderfully even curve on a graph that shows it’s all going in the same direction,” she said. “Venice was disappointing in that regard.”

“5050x2020 was designed to galvanise action. I didn’t think any of us would achieve gender parity across all of the festivals but there has been significant progress,” she added.

The pledge, which was signed by all major film festivals, including Cannes and Venice, has three main requirements. Participants must compile statistics about the gender and race of the directors for all the films submitted to selection, as well as, when applicable, of cast and crew. They must release information on the gender and race of members of selection committees, programmers and programming consultants, and of participants. And they must release data on the makeup of executive boards – while committing “to a schedule to achieve parity in these bodies”.

Berlin’s data is the first release by a big European festival, with the next two festivals the most important in the film calendar: Cannes in May and Venice in September. Both have served as the launchpad for Oscar-winners in recent years, and both have been criticised for their handling of diversity.

Rabbatts said the potential for progress was evidenced by Spike Lee’s appointment as the jury chair at Cannes this year, as well as the mass resignation of the César awards board after the director Roman Polanski received 12 nominations. “We’re seeing the repercussions of 5050 and Time’s Up playing out across festivals and awards,” she said. “The collective resignation at the Césars shows that transparency around voting and membership has become one of the main issues.”

Polly Kemp, actor and founder of the gender equality campaign group Era 50:50, said the focus on senior positions was crucial. “If you’ve got parity on your board, you get much more balanced programming,” she said. “I would never say you have to have 50/50 on screen, but you should be transparent as a festival.”

Rabbatts said the push for diversity needed to include awards bodies as well as festivals, and that the argument that a lack of diversity can stem from “industry-wide” issues was misleading. “The festivals are part of the industry,” she said. “You can’t opt out of your own responsibility.”

Rabbatts also dismissed the idea of introducing a women-only directing award at next year’s Baftas after the seventh consecutive year of all-male directing nominees. “That feels to me [as if] you are ghettoising women and people of colour,” she said of an idea that has also been suggested for non-white directors. “You’re saying that our films are somehow not considered to be within the main competition – that’s how it will feel and that’s how it will be translated.”

She said introducing quotas would also be misguided because people would feel they were there because of their identity rather than merit. Instead of quotas, said Rabbatts, there should be targets to provide a “sense of a journey” and a simple way to see whether progress had been made.

“Five years ago, nobody asked the question of diversity at Bafta, or if they did it was an adjunct to something,” she said. “Now it is centre stage. Once you open that box there’s no going back.”

Photo: Omer Messinger/EPA

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