September Is #DirectedByWomen Month

In 1981, Jessie Maple was the first African American woman director to helm an independent film.

I am not a super diligent film, television, and media critic. If that were so, maybe my sporadic blog posts would be much more constant and consistent. It is a shame, considering how much I value the topic. At heart, I am primarily a self-indulgent soap opera buff, especially obsessing over Y&R when the writers don’t anger me (which is often). I started this journey as an offset to my unfulfilled desires, drawing on fond memories as a short-term staff writer of a great feminist film/tv site while tackling graduate school, carrying on a painter/drawer practice, and writing a food/lifestyle/art blog. It was a complicated challenge to juggle and maintain simultaneously.

While I wrote for the site, which raised various complex issues, I became fixated onto topics that I hadn’t previously thought about. Most of the films/TV shows that I grew up idolizing were mostly male driven manifestos, writing women as desperate, man hungry, dependent. Even black male writer/directors created stereotypical black women characters who needed a man to feel important. Success and independence were simply not good enough. Plus, not every man could write a believable woman to woman friendship either.

There is just a big fat enormous difference when one starts watching women directed films.

Monica (Sanaa Lathan) puts basketball first in Gina Prince-Blythewood's unforgettable sports romance, Love and Basketball, up for a nomination at the National Film Registry.

For starters, dimensional characters are fully fleshed out and emotionally layered, valuing their careers or wanting to change the road they’ve taken. They have real friends that support or hate their choices-- no sugar coating allowed. In Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, Issa Rae's The Misadventures of the Awkward Black Girl, and Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, I find strong, valid female characters that are relatable, refreshing, and kinship worthy. With women directors, the camera focus is on these real, substantial humanized women who are not objects to be critiqued on appearance and personality. They’re allowed to breathe and exist without some selfish, egotistical male presence spitting out their supposed moral obligations (as well as take over her narrative).

Alice Guy-Blaché was the first woman director with some 443 director credits. Currently, a documentary called Be Natural: the Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché is in the works!

I found encouragement in film theory women writers and film enthusiast bloggers, candidly dissecting lifelong errors of the troubled male gaze, dismantling how we were seen and misconstrued for almost forever. In this mecca of thoughtful regard, I discovered wonderful films helm by women and wanted to see and support as much as I could. I went to the theaters, searched on Netflix, and joined crowd sourcing sites Indiegogo and Seed & Spark, supporting a few GoFundMe's along the way. I joined ARRAY too, which works diligently at distributing films from around the world.

Most importantly, I must applaud Barbara Ann O'Leary, the creator of the Twitter hashtag #DirectedByWomen, for campaigning every year for women's voices to be known and watched. She gave a fantastic interview at Screen Queens, giving the scope of how dedicated she is to informing the world about women in film, in TV, on the web:

One thing that‘s grown is the #DirectedbyWomen list of women who have directed film (and I use film as a shorthand for any motion picture creation: TV, webisodes, video installation art, etc). At the moment the list has 10,611 directors and it is growing all the time. I have a backlog of information to add. On the new and full moon each month I dedicate 6 hours to intensively add content to the list. Sometimes I sneak in updates between those times but this work could take all my time, so I have to pace myself.  Every day I find out about more women who have directed in the past or are directing now.  It’s really exciting and I love helping others bring their attention to their work.

Almost 11,000+ works directed by women, waiting to be discovered and talked about.

Julie Dash directing Daughters of the Dust.

For September, I focus on women directed film. This week includes two revisits: Dee Rees’ Pariah and Mona Achache’s Hedgehog and reaction pieces to the five-episode web series, Hermione’s Quarter Life Crisis, Victoria Muhaney’s Yelling to the Sky, and Celine Sciamma’s Girlhood. For remainder of the month, I would love to see other films by women directors unfamiliar to me and pen reactionary posts about their visions.