Need a new shirt? A new pair of shoes? A pair of slacks?

Please buy them at JC Penney.

No, seriously. In an incredibly ballsy move, JC Penney just released a Father’s Day ad featuring real-life couple and fathers Todd Koch and Cooper Smith goofing around with their gorgeous kids, Claire and Mason.

These are exactly the kind of men we’d like to see more of in the mainstream media.

So we’re supporting JC Penney. And we hope you do, too. Here are some choice picks from some St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival staff. And, yes, JC Penney ships to Canada.

Hot shirt! JC Penney has about five bazillion shirts for sale. They’re not all great. But this one works.

These are really good runners. I ran the Cape to Cabot in them last fall, and I plan to buy them again. From JC Penney.

Dang! Maggie Keiley, who is taking over for Kelly Davis as executive director of the Women’s Film Fest for a year, is on a mission to wear less black. Accordingly, she chose a pair of bright red skinny jeans. Atta girl!

Not as flashy in the colour department (and what’s with that poor woman’s halfway head?), but this is a nice dress.

It’d look especially hot with these DAMN FINE BOOTS. Hello.

These are wicked.

Pawing through JC Penney’s website is a bit like shopping at Frenchy’s, to be honest. Have you found anything good? Send it my way (sarah@womensfilmfestival.com) and I’ll post it.

“So, hey,” says a co-worker this morning, “what happened with the petitions and the protests at Cannes?”

Unfortunately, not much.

If you need a quick recap, there were no women-directed films selected to compete for a Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. That inspired a letter to La Presse from French directors who organized themselves into a group they called La Barbe, and a petition to the festival directors calling for industry-wide discussions about women in film.

Well, the petition, organized by Melissa Silverstein of Women And Hollywood, got 2,706 signatures. La Barbe staged a few protests during the film festival. There was a panel discussion about women and film at Cannes, moderated by Anne Thompson, of indiewire’s Thompson on Hollywood.

And then there was an official comment from Gilles Jacob, president of the Cannes Film Festival, pictured at left, texting during Sean Penn’s friggin’ boring speech, luh.

“I am sure that next year the chief selector, Thierry Frémaux, will look more carefully to find films by women,” he said, according to the Guardian.

And then he said this: “[Selecting four women-directed films for the competition in 2001] was maybe a wrong move. Now everyone this year was expecting five films, then six, then seven. In France nowadays, they speak of parity. They want parity in government, parity everywhere, so why not at the Cannes film festival?”

So, yeah. It seems safe to assume that Cannes still doesn’t get it.

Onwards!

If you’d like to read a great synopsis of Cannes and the panel with Anne Thompson, check out Noreen Golfman’s write-up on her blog, Postcards From The Edge, hosted by MUN. Here’s a little excerpt:

It’s safe to say the panel was a whimpering disappointment. Maybe it’s because the invited panel were all suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, but I felt a discernible chill in the room, and it wasn’t coming off the azure waters of the Mediterranean.

When women who are the exceptions to the gender-biased rule start saying they don’t see there’s any problem in the industry you know they haven’t walked through the looking glass. Sure, there were hardships in the industry, they agreed, but, come on, it had nothing to do with gender, only lack of merit.

The whole post is fantastic and definitely worth a read.

Ingrid Veninger, she of unparalleled indie/low-budget filmmaking stardom (seriously, have you seen i am a good person/i am a bad person yet?), is going to help you make a film.

Because she’s incredible like that.

Here are the details that she just posted on her Facebook page:

“$1000 Feature Film Challenge: Start thinking about do-able projects now! Here is what I know FOR SURE:

a) I want to put all of my Box Office from the June 14-21st RUN of i am a good person/i am a bad person at THE ROYAL, 608 College Street in Toronto, towards the Challenge.

b) Submission Deadline will be June 21st (You can submit ANY DAY of the Run from June 14-21st). But Absolute Last day to Submit is June 21st — That’s 34 Days from TODAY. No Excuses. Open to TO-based filmmakers.

c) Submissions must include: 1-3 page OUTLINE (or Treatment or Script, if you have one), $1000 Budget (this has got to be real), Team Bios, Cover Letter to pUNK Films Inc. THAT’S IT.

d) I would like to offer EVERYONE WHO SUBMITTED a PROJECT to take part in a DIY Micro-Budget Masterclass the weekend of June 23rd/24th. IT WILL BE FREE but YOU HAVE TO SUBMIT A PROJECT TO TAKE PART IN THE CLASS (and it’s going to be awesome-just sayin’).

e) Final Film Selections will be Announced on Monday June 25th. You will sign an Executive Producer Agreement with me and I will personally mentor each Project but I WILL NOT INTERFERE. Filmmakers have final cut and will own their movies. * Am hoping we can get at least 5 features made *

f) PRODUCTION: PROJECTS MUST SHOOT IN JULY – 4 weeks.

g) POST-PRODUCTION: PROJECTS MUST POST IN AUGUST/SEPTEMBER – 6 weeks

h) SCREENING: Each Film will be screened at THE ROYAL – Sept. 26-30th (dates still TBC 100%).

I am still working on some additional perks.
So start dreamin’ up your movies and let’s make this happen.
Have a great long weekend.
Sincerely,
Ingrid V. pUNK films”

“Just make better movies.”

That’s an easy response to the Cannes situation, for sure. And it seems fairly logical: jury selects best films, women feel they ought to be selected, therefore women should make best films. It’s a frigging syllogism, fer chrissake.

But the thing is, we feel like the “best film” part is rigged.

If you have a look at, say, this recent study by Martha Lauzen, a professor in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at San Diego State University, you’ll see that women don’t play very big roles in the “best films.” They make up about 33% of all characters in 2011′s top-grossing North American films. And only 11% of all full-fledged leads are female characters.

We are accustomed to watching movies about men. That’s what we get, and that’s what we expect. And it starts at an early age: actress Geena Davis founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media when she noticed that all of the G-rated family films available for her kids were mostly about males. So, she commissioned a few studies, and found that, yeah, male characters in family films outnumber female characters by about three to one.

Men make films about men: the Geena Davis Institute also found that 7% of all directors, 13% of all writers, and 20% of all producers are female. (Heck, if you get even one female writer working on a film, screen time for female characters goes up by 10.4%.)

So we’re worried that, with all of that going on in the background, an unconscious requirement for “best film” is that it should be about a man, and that it’ll probably also be directed by a man.

And that, we think, sucks.

Melissa Silverstein over at Women and Hollywood just put together a great petition calling for industry-wide discussions with the leaders of festivals like Cannes about the status of women in film, and we were honoured to sign it.

Marian Evans, at Wellywood Women, wrote a great post about possible solutions to the problem of under-representation of women in film.

The Guardian just re-printed La Barbe’s letter to Cannes, translated from the original French.

Flavourwire just posted a great (but brief) history of women nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes.

The Toronto Sun just wrote about it. The BBC’s on the case. Cannes jury member Andrea Arnold told the Telegraph that the situation is a “great pity and a great disappointment.”

Even CTV is reporting about it.

Here’s hoping it works.

If you agree with all this, please sign the petition here.

Man, oh man, it’s heating up at Cannes.

Though the red carpet hasn’t yet been unrolled, this year’s Cannes Film Festival is already embroiled in controversy. As you may recall, there were no woman-directed films selected to compete for a Palme d’Or this year. And that has many female directors outraged.

An opinion piece that ran this week in the Le Monde, France’s main daily newspaper, calls the festival outright sexist. The article is signed by Baise Moi director Virginie Despentes, filmmaker Coline Serreau and actress Fanny Cottonçon.

“You have worked out how to prevent women from finding a place in this protected environment…,” it reads. “Above all we mustn’t let young girls get the idea that one day they could have the audacity to make a film and climb the steps to the palace on their own merit rather than on the arm of a prince charming.”

They’ve also launched a petition, called Cannes 2012: A Man is a Man, and are planning to protest at the festival wearing fake beards.

So Noreen Golfman, founder of the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival, is on the job. She’ll be over at Cannes from May 16 to May 27 tweeting about all the action. Follow her at @ngolfman and at #SJIWFFinCannes.

Best on-site reporter ever? We sure think so.