One of the traditional panel discussions at this year’s Italian gathering focused on the underrepresentation of women in filmmaking

Nadia Trevisan, Barbara Weis, Eva Trobisch and Martine De Biasi during the panel discussion (© Daniele Fiorentino)

To accompany its main programme and film selection, Bolzano Film Festival Bozen hosted a series of panels focusing on different topics pertinent to the film industry. One of them bore the title “The Gender Gap and the Role of Female Producers”, and was organised in collaboration with the two local and South Tyrolean initiatives Female Views and FAS Frauen Roundtable. The discussion saw the involvement of a group of four women, comprising Italian producer Nadia Trevisan, of Nefertiti Film; director-producer Eva Trobisch (Ivo [+see also:
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The latter was the moderator of the panel and started off by quoting a few figures from the recent Gender Report from Austria. Despite the quotas in place in that country, the number of women in heads-of-department positions is rising at a very slow pace. Women are still underrepresented in all professional fields of the film industry. However, the fact that things are moving forward does show that the initiatives are working, those on stage concurred. Some bitterness followed, however, when De Biasi stated that at Bolzano Film Festival Bozen itself, only three out of the 12 films in the main competition were directed by a woman, bringing to the fore the panel’s core concern.

Are quotas a tool to fight against the underrepresentation of women in the film industry? This was the most heavily discussed question during the meeting. “I keep going back and forth between yes and no,” said Trevisan. “On the one hand, I don't want a quota, because it is also a way of marginalising women. I don't want to benefit from better conditions solely because I am a woman. I want my project to be supported because it has been deemed a good project, and not only a woman's project.” In light of this, Trevisan still thinks that a lot more space is needed for women in the international film industry, which her co-panellists all agreed with. She added that she tends to focus her actions on a more individual level.

As for her job as a female producer, she explained that she mostly works with women. When a head-of-department position has to be filled, she makes the decision together with the director, and always prepares a selection of both women and men in order to be able to give both a fair chance. On the set of her last film, there was only one man, the sound engineer, while everybody else, including the entire grip department, was female – rather a rare occurrence. In post-production, though, the situation was quite the contrary, except for the editor being a woman.

“In order to have role models and orientation, we need a push from the politicians,” said Trobisch. For her, it's not a problem that is inherent in the film industry only. “It's more a topic of family politics than film politics. In film school, you mostly have a good split between the sexes. But afterwards, if you start a family, that changes. If it were more normal for men to take care of children – but also of the elderly, or if they did any more caregiving tasks – these images and concepts would change our society and, with it, different industries as well.”

The issue of childcare and caregiving is only one side of the coin; decent funding is another, opined the panellists. It’s not only women with families who are left behind. Statistics show that women often have smaller budgets to work with for their projects. This situation is also clear to Barbara Weis, who, as mentioned above, is a member of the IDM Film Commission and in charge of evaluating funding applications. “Women tend to be more self-critical; their reactions to decisions from hierarchical institutions are different,” she said. “If I have to disappoint a man, sometimes he doesn't accept it and asks to speak to a politician at the next-highest level – who, most of the time, happens to be a man. In South Tyrol, we have fewer women members of advisory boards in institutions. The reaction from the Chamber of Commerce was to offer training courses to women in order to enable them to become one. It happens to be a requirement, too. Not so for men: they don't need any proven qualification in order to be a board member.”

“Sometimes, I wish I had the confidence of a mediocre man,” said De Biasi, not totally sarcastically. Do women have to act like men in order to be as successful as men? This philosophical question wrapped up the panel. No real answer emerged from the discussion, but rather, there was a kind of reminder of how persistent our role models are. While the discussions on this topic have to continue to raise awareness of it, there is also a need for everyone to shape her or his immediate environment – for example, by not continuing to copy the old system, and instead come up with a new way of doing things.