A recent dip in female-led theatrical releases in the UK - back to 2018 levels of 26% reminds us that our work is far from over; that we cannot be complacent.
Below you can read about the research we conduct into gender representation in film and the wider industry, tracking the release landscape to present an accurate picture of investment in films by filmmakers of marginalised genders.
Here you can also find out about news and opportunities at Reclaim The Frame, along with curated film recommendations, filmmaker interviews, and creative responses.
Dee Rees was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee before she entered NYU’s prestigious graduate program in her late 20s.
Her first work was in short film while getting her Master’s degree. “Orange Bow” (2005) was her first festival work, earning her acclaim and awards. During her time at NYU, she wrote the script for what would become her breakout film “Pariah” (2011). For her thesis, she directed the first act of it in the short film “Pariah” (2007), another well-received work. It led to her screenwriting and directing fellowship at Sundance in 2008, which led to her first feature film, the documentary “Eventual Salvation” (2008). Her first fictional movie was “Pariah” (2011), a semi-autobiographical tale about a young black women trying to find herself. The film was critically acclaimed, and Rees’ next work was picked up by HBO, as she made the TV movie “Bessie” (2015) starring Queen Latifah as singer Bessie Smith. “Bessie” was a critical darling, netting multiple Primetime Emmy Awards, including a pair of nominations for Rees for her writing and directing. Before embarking on her next full-length work, Rees dabbled in television directing, helming an episode of “Empire” (Fox 2015- ). Her next film, the period drama “Mudbound” (2017), was picked up by Netflix after a successful festival showing. As that film was coming out, it was announced that Rees’ next project was an adaptation of the Joan Didion novel “The Last Thing He Wanted.”
PARIAH (2011)
Rees’ 2011 film tells the story of 17-year old Alike, who is starting to explore and embrace her sexuality (as a lesbian). Rees followed this movie with the 2015 HBO biopic Bessie, about queer blues singer Bessie Smith (played by Queen Latifah). She’s helping to develop the TV adaptation of The Warmth of Other Suns, along with Shonda Rhimes. If you’ve got time, you should also check out the period film Mudblood, as well as her documentary Eventual Salvation.
WHERE TO WATCH PARIAH CLICK HERE
Laura Linney was born into a theatrical family; her father was the playwright Romulus Linney. She graduated from Brown University in 1986 and later studied at the Arts Theatre School in Moscow and graduated from the Juilliard School (M.F.A.) in New York City in 1990. She immediately began performing on Broadway, eventually earning praise for her roles in Six Degrees of Separation and Hedda Gabler.
In 2007 Linney portrayed a playwright still reeling from her dysfunctional childhood in The Savages, for which she was nominated for a third Academy Award.
Tamara Jenkins’s “The Savages” is a beautifully nuanced tragicomedy about two floundering souls. NY TIMES
Director, Tamara Jenkins began her career with a short film, 1991’s Fugitive Love, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Afterwards, she completed a congressional mandate associated with PBS to bring diverse programming to public television that was funded by the Independent Television Service. Another black-and-white short, 1993’s Family Remains, followed, which received a Special Jury Prize for Excellence in Short Filmmaking at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival.
Her debut feature film, 1998’s semi-autobiographical Slums of Beverly Hills, which she wrote and directed, played at both Sundance and the Cannes Film Festival. Based on her own experience growing up in Beverly Hills in the 1970s, the film is a dark comedy about a nomadic family in Los Angeles. Using photographs Jenkins had kept from her time at Beverly Hills High School, art director Scott Plauch and production designer Dena Roth were able to create an accurate period depiction of Beverly Hills, while also staying true to the autobiographical element which is key to the film’s success.
Starring Alan Arkin, Natasha Lyonne and Marisa Tomei, Slums of Beverly Hills was nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards (Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay). Jenkins took a nearly decade-long hiatus to complete her next feature film. In the nine-year gap between her two films, she worked on an eventually abandoned screenplay about photographer Diane Arbus. Before returning to her next feature film, Jenkins branched out to explore theater, essay publications, and nonprofit film and TV work. In 2003, she directed The New Group’s theater production of A Likely Story, written and performed by David Cale.
Shortly after her marriage, Jenkins went to Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, to work on the screenplay that would eventually become 2007’s The Savages. For this tragicomedy about a dysfunctional family dealing with the aftershocks of its patriarch’s elderly dementia, Jenkins took inspiration from her experiences with her grandmother and father, both of whom were in nursing homes with dementia. Jenkins’ father, who was much older than Jenkins’ mother, first needed care when she was in her 30s. Additionally, Jenkins built upon her theater work at The New Group, departing from her previously straight dramas to something far more absurd. The film layers a bright, doll-like color palette upon a bleak and often morbid story, relying on the savage wit of her screenplay to tie the film together.
With a modest budget ($8 million) and compressed shooting schedule of 30 days. Starring Laura Linney (who received her third Academy Award nomination for her role) and Philip Seymour Hoffman, the film became a critical success after screening at numerous film festivals, including Sundance and the Toronto International Film Festival. Jenkins was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
After the success of The Savages, it took Jenkins eleven years to make her third feature film, Private Life. When discussing the more than a decade-long hiatus, Jenkins noted that successful female directors do not often produce films at the same pace as their male counterparts, stating “It’s systemic. It’s gotta be systemic. There is something in the water.”
THE SAVAGES
Two siblings who have not met their father in years undertake the responsibility of caring for him when he suffers from dementia. After the death of their father, they realise the meaning of family.
WHERE TO WATCH CLICK HERE
“As a screenwriter and director, Lupino had an eye for the emotional truth hidden within the taboo or mundane, making a series of B-styled pictures which featured sympathetic, honest portrayals of such controversial subjects as unmarried mothers, bigamy, and rape … in The Hitch-Hiker, arguably Lupino’s best film and the only true noir directed by a woman, two utterly average middle-class American men are held at gunpoint and slowly psychologically broken by a serial killer. In addition to her critical but compassionate sensibility, Lupino had a great filmmaker’s eye, using the starkly beautiful street scenes in Not Wanted and the gorgeous, ever-present loneliness of empty highways in The Hitch-Hiker to set her characters apart.” – Critic John Krewson
The Hitch-Hiker is a 1953 film noir directed by Ida Lupino, about two fishing buddies who pick up a mysterious hitchhiker during a trip to Mexico.
Inspired by the crime spree of the psychopathic murderer Billy Cook (1928–1952), the screenplay was written by Lupino and her former husband Collier Young, based on a story by Daniel Mainwaring which was adapted by Robert L. Joseph. Mainwaring did not receive a screen credit due to his then being on the Hollywood blacklist.
The Hitch-Hiker is The Hitch-Hiker is regarded as the first American mainstream film noir directed by a woman and was selected in 1998 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”
The inspiration for The Hitch-Hiker is the true-life story of Billy Cook, who in California in 1950, murdered a family of five and a traveling salesman, then kidnapped Deputy Sheriff Homer Waldrip from Blythe, California. Cook ordered his captive to drive into the desert, where he tied Deputy Waldrip up with blanket strips and took his police cruiser, leaving Waldrip to die. Waldrip got loose, however, walked to the main road, and got a ride back to Blythe. Cook also took two men hostage who were on a hunting trip. Cook was tried, convicted, and received the death penalty. On December 12, 1952, Cook was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison in California
Back in March 2018, to celebrate 100 years since her birth, We hosted an illustrated talk (at Curzon Goldsmiths) about Lupino’s journey from S.E London to Hollywood stardom as an actress then director, and on the female gaze in film noir
In Women Make Film, a documentary film by the British-Irish filmmaker and film critic Mark Cousins, Lupino shows up a number of times for her FRAMING and POV for The Hitch-Hiker, FRAMING and ENDINGS for Hard, Fast and beautiful, and FRAMING for Outrage.Women Make Film premiered on 1 September 2018 at the Venice Film Festival, and was released on the BFI Player in May 2020. The film is divided into 40 chapters over 14 hours and features the work of 183 directors.
We here at Birds’ Eye View hosted weekly viewing parties and Facebook Live responses and debates on Women Make Film, from womxn filmmakers for audiences at home during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.
“Absolutely assured in her creation of the bleak, noir atmosphere – whether in the claustrophobic confines of the car, or lost in the arid expanses of the desert – Lupino never relaxes the tension for one moment. Yet her emotional sensitivity is also upfront: charting the changes in the menaced men’s relationship as they bicker about how to deal with their captor, stressing that only through friendship can they survive. Taut, tough, and entirely without macho-glorification, it’s a gem, with first-class performances from its three protagonists, deftly characterised without resort to cliché.” – Time Out Film Guide
Critics Bob Porfiero and Alain Silver, in a review and analysis of the film, praised Lupino’s use of shooting locations. They wrote, “The Hitch-Hiker’s desert locale, although not so graphically dark as a cityscape at night, isolates the protagonists in a milieu as uninviting and potentially deadly as any in film noir.”
In January 2014, a restored 35mm print was premiered by the Film Noir Foundation at Noir City 12 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco.
On April 6, 2014 The Hitch-Hiker was shown again at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Mary Ann Anderson author of The Making of The Hitch-Hiker appeared at this event.
The film is in the public domain.
FOR MORE ABOUT IDA LUPINO AND HER FILMS CLICK BFI LISTS HERE
THE HITCH-HIKER WHERE TO BUY, WATCH, STREAM CLICK HERE
WOMEN MAKE FILM WHERE TO WATCH CLICK HERE
Women Make Film, Mark Cousins’ epic documentary, executive produced by Tilda Swinton and Clara Glynn, offers a completely fresh take on film history, exploring the development of the medium exclusively through work directed by women. The first of five programmes explores how directors achieve tone, introduce characters, capture conversations and handle framing and tracking shots. The examples used range across the decades and around the globe, including the pioneering Hollywood director Dorothy Arzner, Elaine May, Agnès Varda, Vĕra Chytilová, Maren Ade and Yuliya Solntseva.
