Out Takes

4 Jan 2016

Women in Film

Arts, TV & Film

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Sue Maslin

Following the release of Suffragette, which chronicles the radicalisation of the women’s suffrage movement in Britain at the turn of the 20th century, we turn our attention to the gender gap in the Australian film industry and ask why the leads on our screens and behind our cameras are overwhelmingly men.

Recent studies have shown that of film school graduates in Australia nearly fifty percent are women, so why do women make up just 29 percent of Australian producers, 21 percent of Australian screenwriters, and 16 percent of Australian directors? Does the paucity of women in our film industry promote poor female representation on screen? If so, what measures should our film industry take to encourage higher representation of women on both sides of the camera?

Sue Maslin, award winning producer of The Dressmaker and tireless advocate for equality in the film industry, joins us to discuss these alarming statistics. In her recent paper ‘Adjusting the Set’, Maslin writes that nothing will shift until we make ‘the business case’. So what is the business case? And how do we ‘adjust the set’? We’re also joined by Lisa French, who has written extensively on gender in the film industry and heads the Media and Communications department at RMIT. She argues that women who are film makers imbue their work with a ‘female perspective’. We ask French why the ‘female perspective’ is so important, and what the consequences of under representation mean for women – and men – in our society.