Shahrbanoo Sadat Says Women Film-Makers Hit Barriers Long Before Festivals
Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat says women face their biggest obstacles long before their films reach a festival screen. Speaking at the Tokyo International Film Festival, she said a lack of funding, and ignorance among the institutions that hand out money, leaves women at an inherent disadvantage in the industry.
The talk, called "The Future of Women's Cinema," took place in the Tokyo Talk series at the festival's TIFF Lounge in Tokyo Midtown Hibiya. Sadat appeared alongside Serbian director Jelena Maksimović, and the session was moderated by film scholar and presenter Takasaki Ikuko. The festival said the discussion would look at how the two directors portray women and feminism in their work.
Sadat argued that discrimination starts at the development stage, when projects are first pitched and financed, rather than at the point of selection. She pointed to the small number of films by women chosen for competition programmes as evidence of the problem further down the line. Variety reported her remarks on Sunday.
Maksimović described a harder situation in her home country. She said Film Center Serbia, the state body that supports film, had its funding cut off entirely by the outgoing government. She linked the cut to filmmakers' backing of student anti-corruption protests.
She also said that film-makers working on less mainstream features often do not apply for large grants at all. They already expect that the money will not come, so they do not try.
Sadat is now based in Germany. Her latest feature, No Good Men, opened the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, the Berlinale, earlier this year. Ahead of that festival she told Reuters that films about Afghanistan made by outside filmmakers are often very sad, and she said she wanted to offer a different picture. Reuters carried those comments.
Her Tokyo appearance came during a busy stretch for her and for Mohammad Rasoulof, the Iranian director. The two screened their shorts made for the Displacement Film Fund, a project presented by Cate Blanchett and set up for filmmakers working away from home. Deadline reported the screenings. Earlier in the week, the two had also pushed back on a proposed separate Oscar category for exiled filmmakers.
Sadat also served on the jury for this year's Venice competition. Maksimović's film Until the Day Ends played in the Orizzonti section at Venice, the festival's showcase for newer and more experimental work.
Festivals are where films get their public moment, but the talks in Tokyo kept returning to the stage before that. Who gets a development loan, who gets a state grant, and who applies at all decide which stories ever get filmed. For general readers, that chain starts long before the red carpet.
