EWA talks concrete steps for gender equality

The European Women’s Audiovisual Network (EWA) held an Industry Meetup in Brakke Grond’s Tuinzaal, where more than 50 participants gathered at round tables to discuss concrete steps that can be taken to tackle issues of access to women-led content, quotas for funding, workplace inequality, need for mutual support, and necessary structural changes.

Tuesday, November 26, saw the European Women’s Audiovisual Network (EWA) hold the third informal event at IDFA, where participants shared their experiences of working in the male-dominated industry and discussed potential concrete steps that can be taken in the struggle to improve the position of women film professionals.

The event was moderated by Tamara Tatishvili, Strategy and Partnerships Manager of the EWA Network, and Brigid O’Shea, Head of Industry at DOK Leipzig.

“I joined the EWA Network team recently and my mission is to contribute to strengthening its strategy and work on possible new action plans for our members and partners,” Tatishvili told us. “For this purpose I need to analyze the current state of gender equality agenda in Europe and understand which allies should be targeted to create better conditions for women working in AV sector.

“Industry events like we organize in IDFA help immensely to stay connected with professionals and hear their voices; understand what is missing in their professional lives in order to be more empowered. It is important for us not to sit in panels all the time but get out there and hear about real needs. That is how we can tailor programs and offer meaningful activities.

“But I shall be also very clear in saying that such action will be possible only if, in the coming year, real funding is available for action under the bigger aim of decreasing the gender gap. Enough research has been done and enough awareness campaigns run now to be sure that strong action is needed with tailor made funding available in this domain,” says Tatishvili.

Funding parity

The Montreal International Documentary Festival film and industry programmer Selin Melek Murat led the table that discussed parity quotas. “There are so many women who graduated from film schools or are in the industry but never got to make their first films, or, which is more often the case, made their first films but never got to the second one,” Murat said. “So we have to change something concrete there—within a funding system, you have to either increase it to give funding to women, or to divide it in the way that ensures women get it. For instance, all the Canadian funders have agreed on parity and 2020 is the year when all Canadian funders have to give 50% of the money to women.”

The same table discussed access to women-led content for festival programmers. They had to admit that at the moment it may be harder to find such productions but that they definitely exist. “It has to be considered when you’re making your program,” Murat said. “We have to develop better access to women-led content for programmers and other channels of distribution and placement, in fact, so that they don’t have the excuse to say, ‘There just wasn’t that many women-led films this year.’ It’s not true, it exists, you just have to look for it harder.”

Another topic tackled at this table was a potential system of mutual support—a ‘buddy system,’ as they dubbed it. “When you work by yourself, you develop anxieties making difficult decisions, and you should have someone to support you. A buddy system could make this easier and actually streamlined,” said Murat.

This community-building aspect was supported by discussion at the table led by Marion Schmidt of Germany’s Dox Box. “We talked a lot about how we feel alone and how in particular when you have to take a break from the industry, because of maternal leave or whatever other reason, you feel like you are not part of this anymore,” she said, “Simply knowing that other people feel the same could already help you to overcome this feeling. Maybe we could have a concrete case studies of negative experiences.”

Workplace inequality

This topic segued into workplace inequality which was discussed at the table headed by O’Shea. “We need to make sure that people who are vulnerable in their workplaces don’t feel alone to call out the structural inequality that they encounter daily, sharing information about our wages, work conditions, and poor management structures,” said O’Shea. “A lot of people who find themselves in creative industries are actually trained cultural managers, and they are really cultural practitioners who suddenly find themselves in administrative human resource manager positions. We need to give these people access to tools that can make them better administrators, including mandatory unconscious bias training.”

It is becoming increasingly clear that the issues women in the industry are facing require deep structural changes. “What’s coming up is access to finance, specifically towards development, and that you can’t constantly question where the female filmmakers are disappearing to after graduating from the film school if you don’t look into the systemic organization of funding and whether we are creating enough tailor-made opportunities for them to tell their stories,” said Tatishvili.

The problems discussed went beyond gender issues, but are certainly connected to them. An important one is identity. “We have people here who have projects that deal with belonging, nationality, and the kind of story you want to tell, and they are struggling,” said Tatishvili. “They are applauded on the pitch level at different platforms, but there is no first fund financier who wants to finance them, because their structure is not regular. That’s a complex subject way beyond gender equality agenda that can be worked on with fund representatives.”

Documentary scene as a template for the industry

In a conversation after the event, O’Shea explained how it is exactly the documentary scene that actually might be able to offer an approach that can be applied more universally.

“There are structural differences between fiction, documentary, and animation—that’s clear—and our natural meeting points are different. Cannes, Berlinale, and the AFM are places where the fiction people meet and documentaries are secondary—unlike here at IDFA. But thankfully these festivals are also opening up spaces for us. So that means that the EWA is visible in these fiction places but wasn’t as visible in documentary, because the original foundation members are coming from a fiction background,” O’Shea told us.

“But documentary has that benefit that we are actually closer to achieving the goal of gender parity than the fiction field, for various structural reasons, and the most fundamental one being money. Documentaries are cheaper to make than fiction films, thus the playing field in the fight for resources is more even. Maybe we can prototype equality in documentary industry faster and easier and create structures that could then be applied to fiction industry,” she said.

The EWA event at IDFA was also attended Maria Silvia Gatta, from European Commission’s Directorate‑General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology. She told us:

“In line with the European Gender Strategy of the new European Commission set out by President Ursula von der Leyen, gender equality will be a priority of the future Creative Europe Programme 2021-2027. MEDIA intends to contribute to gender equality in the audiovisual sector, through studies, mentoring, training and networking activities.

“The audiovisual sector is moving ahead: amazing to meet so many inspiring women yesterday at the IDFA meeting of European Women’s Audiovisual (EWA) Network. The talent, creativity and commitment of such network strengthen our effort to achieve better representation of gender and diversity in the European Audiovisual industry”.

Source: IDFA