The Celluloid Ceiling is Canadian, too.

Each year, Dr. Martha Lauzen releases the Celluloid Ceiling Report, an annual look at how many of Hollywood’s top-grossing films are written or directed women, and how many female characters these films tend to have.

The numbers are usually pretty brutal.

Tomorrow, at the Masonic Hall, at 9am, Rina Fraticelli from Women in View, a Toront-based non profit that advocates for fair representation of women and visible minorities in film and television, will release the first annual Women in View on Film report.

The report looks at how many Canadian feature films were directed or written by women and/or visible minorities.

“The numbers are not good,” says Fraticelli.

You can listen to her interview with Chris O’Neill Yates on CBC WAM here.

What do you think? Should we even care? Should we have a quota system? Does looking at stats like these reveal a deep insecurity that maybe women really aren’t as good as men at stuff like, oh, making massively lucrative and successful films?

You can have your say during a panel discussion that will follow the release of the report. Rina Fraticelli, Jordan Canning, Barbara Doran, Kay Armitage, Susan Alexander, and a representative from Telefilm will be there, hashing it out.

To register, email forum@womensfilmfestival.com
  • http://darcyfitzpatrick.tumblr.com/ Darcy Fitzpatrick

    There are so many issues at play when it comes to the way women are represented in film, both in front of and behind the lens. If I had to pick just one thing that I think would be the most effective at combating the situation, it would be the encouragement and development of more women in the industry. More women writers especially, since that’s where all the stories come from.

    Writing advice is always the same: write what you know. So for the most part men are going to write stronger and more prevalent male characters and women are going to write stronger and more prevalent female characters. There are always going to be exceptions to that rule but for the most part I think that makes sense.

    There’s a big shift happening in science and math now because more and more female students are dominating in those classes. This didn’t happen because of any rules made to force the hiring of more female scientists within the industry, but because the bullshit stigma of girls not being as good at science and math was attacked at the grass roots level – in the schools, where a difference can really be made.

    I think the same thing needs to happen within the film industry – the message needs to get out to girls at a young age that the film industry isn’t just a big boy’s playground, which I think is still the image being conveyed. And the resources need to be made available for both boys and girls to explore their potential as filmmakers at a young age. The technology is rampant, but the guidance isn’t really in place.

    I saw this illustrated very clearly when I went to teach a filmmaking workshop in Goose Bay and Lab City last month. GB had no access to the technology but the kids were all deeply immersed in the arts and they took to filmmaking like fish in water. The kids in LC had cameras and iMacs and iPads out the wazoo, but no one knew what to make of any of it. The kids there weren’t nearly as engaged.