agnès films Invites You to Join our Community of Female Filmmakers

Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar victory this year (she is the first woman to ever receive an Academy Award for directing) may have some people thinking that women filmmakers have finally found equality in the industry. However, this is regretfully far from the truth. According to the 2009 Celluloid Ceiling report, women accounted for only 9% of directors in 2008, with 22% of films not employing women in any of the key production roles. On the other hand, no films failed to employ men in those positions. And the numbers for women of color are even worse.

As a filmmaker I find myself in the lucky position of being able to improve this situation by hiring women to work on my films. However, whenever I place ads for crewmembers, the responses I get are predominately from white male filmmakers. I am, of course, happy to work with white men, but I also would like to give women, especially women of color, the opportunity to work in my films, which deal predominantly with women’s issues, race and immigration. Where do I find female filmmakers, though?

As a way to resolve this quandary, my colleague Caitlan Spronk and I have started a website for women filmmakers. agnès films (http://agnesfilms.com/) is a website that seeks to create a community of female filmmakers (and men interested in women’s films and film production) that will serve to give visibility to women’s films, provide a place where we can meet other female filmmakers and spark collaborations, as well as give advice to beginning and professional filmmakers in issues like cinematography, editing and copyright issues. With our Filmmaker Profiles, we will also honor women whose work has been influential yet also ignored by the general public. agnès films is named after French filmmaker Agnès Varda. If you would like to learn more about this extraordinary woman, please visit our site and read her profile here: http://agnesfilms.com/profiles/mirrors-rage-and-feminism-sauntering-down-agnes-vardas-world/

We plan to officially launch agnès films in the fall. The site is only a few weeks old, so we’re still looking for contributors and hoping to get some more members (http://agnesfilms.com/members/). We have a category under our resources in which we link to publications by members. If you have any publications in film or video that you would like us to add to the site, please let us know. We are hoping this site will also be useful to film scholars and instructors who use film in their classrooms.

We are happy to work with our members and contributors in shaping the site. If there is something you would like to write for us but you don’t see the right category for it, please let us know and we’ll create it. We are also hoping to expand our resources section, so if you think of any films, filmmakers or festivals that should be part of our site, please let us know.

We are thrilled to share our site with the Caucus and hope to see more Latina/o faces there!