Gillian Armstrong, Tania Chambers, Rosemary Blight and Sacha Horler at the Gender Matters: Brilliant Stories and Brilliant Careers launch.
Last month saw Screen Australia unveil the recipients of its Gender Matters funding, with a who’s who of the local industry gathered at SA’s Ultimo headquarters. A couple of weeks later, Screen NSW announced that any TV dramas hoping to secure financial backing would need to have a female writer, director, or producer onboard to qualify. All the talk about correcting the stats is no longer empty politesse: it’s happening.
With that in mind, there’s never been a better time to unveil IF’s very first women in film and TV issue. Inside, we check in with Foxtel’s Head of Drama Penny Win and Goalpost Pictures’ Kylie du Fresne and Rosemary Blight. There’s a wide-ranging chat with eOne Australia’s acquisitions and development team and a roundtable with nine of Australia’s best female DPs. We chat to Gender Matters recipients like screenwriter Alice Bell and gatekeepers like Nerida Moore, Screen Australia’s head of development. We visit the set of Deep Water, the four-part SBS crime drama starring Yael Stone, and talk to IF alumna Jen Peedom about a life in documentary.
Our team has also canvassed the nation’s film schools to get the lowdown on what they’re doing to level the playing field. That said, if this issue was about nothing but levelling the playing field, it’d be a very boring issue indeed. We’ve tried not to prescribe the issues on the table, and the discussions I’ve had in the last month have been consistently idiosyncratic.
The steps taken this year have been bold, and it’ll be fascinating to watch those initiatives bear fruit. The next six months will likely see the release of Cate Shortland’s Berlin Syndrome, starring the ubiquitous Teresa Palmer, as well as Rosemary Myers’ remarkably stylish debut, Girl Asleep. As for TV, it sometimes seems as though all our best dramas, from Wentworth to The Beautiful Lie, are fronted by women; often characters of far more nuance than their one-dimensionally gruff male counterparts.
Inside we’ve tried to profile a broad group; from those working in development and distribution to emerging writers and directors like Film Fatales’ Brooke Goldfinch and Megan Riakos. It’s not even close to representative. To grab your copy, subscribe here.