Last Sunday, the Academy Awards 2023 were presented in Los Angeles. I’ve been asked for a comment several times already, so here goes!
Many people celebrated the large number of nationalities represented among the award winners and the many different ethnic backgrounds. This can be considered good news, although it is largely due to EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, which was nominated for eleven awards and won seven. This fantasy comedy about a Chinese immigrant family in the USA involved a great many Asian filmmakers or US filmmakers with Asian background behind and obviously in front of the camera. The frequently used phrase “the first actress nominated for a leading role who identifies as Asian” in connection with the Malaysian leading actress Michelle Yeohseems a bit strange though.*
There was also great excitement over two actresses winning the awards for Best Actress in a Leading Role and Best Actress in a Supporting Role respectively. Two actresses over 60 I should add.
I can’t say much about other diversity categories in front of and behind the cameras, as I haven’t seen any of the films except for SHE SAID, the drama about the revelation of the Weinstein crimes and starting-point of the #metoo movement. Oh, and SHE SAID wasn’t nominated at all, in any category. Well, what can I say.**
6-Departments-Check – a Tragedy
What I can offer, however, is a statistical evaluation of the shares of women and men in six departments in the fifteen films that were nominated in at least two categories. The six departments I examined this time are producers (instead of sound), directors, writers, directors of photography, editors and composers. And this 6-departments-check is a tragedy, unless you like pink and one-sidedness:
As you can see in the diagram, directing and screenplay under 10 % women’s share, camera less than 15 %, production and editing around 20 %, music under 25 %.
Has anyone made an issue of this, was it mentioned in the media? If they have, I didn’t notice. It’s as if sexism, gender imbalance, structural discrimination against women in film and television are not really of interest as separate issues anymore, since we are now talking about diversity. And that means “everything else”, even if many men and a few women would like to persuade us that diversity includes women. I tend to think No it doesn’t.
The 73rd Berlin Film Festival took place from Feb. 16 to 26 this year. Since 2020 the festival is led by artistic director Carlo Chatrian, (Italian film critic and festival director) and managing director Mariette Rissenbeek (Dutch film producer and marketing manager). 2023 the jury president is US actress Kristen Stewart, and there are 19 films in competition.
The Berlin Competition 2023
The competition, “the centrepiece of the Berlinale and the festival’s calling card,” is described rather ambitiously on the website berlinale.de:
(the competition) provides a detailed picture of the cinema as it is and as it will be. Whether from established or up-and-coming directors, films in the Competition present the best of the year’s selection.
As the festival’s centre of gravity, the Competition concentrates the energy of the Berlinale and catches the world’s attention. It is the focal point of the festival and screens some of the year’s most talked-about films, frequently prompting heated debates. Embracing the diversity of cinema and its extensive production in the 21st century, the Competition aims to surprise, entertain and enrich public audiences and industry professionals alike. It reflects and relates to the world in which we are living: its selection allows viewers to understand their place in it more fully and to recognise and respect the place of others.
This year, Carlo Chatrian, supported by a selection committee, has chosen 19 films for the competition, including the documentary SUR L’ADAMANT / ON THE ADAMANT (directed by Nicolas Philibert) and two animated films, ART COLLEGE 1994 (directed by Liu Jian) and すずめの戸締まり / SUZUME (directed by MakotoShinkai).
6-Departments-Check 2023
The first image shows the 6-departments-check for the 19 competition films, i.e. the share of women and men for the departments of direction, screenplay, camera, sound, editing and music. The data for sound (16 films) and music (14 films) are still incomplete, since not all positions could be determined via official sources. At this point, many thanks to Mayho Ho, who researched the gender of some team members of the two Chinese films for me. Dankeschön!
The proportion of female directors and writers is just under one third. The equality of the values is also due to the fact that 15 directors wrote the scripts alone and 4 others wrote them as part of a team. This is still far from the 50% threshhold that has been called for for years, and not only for films by female directors. Female editors make up less than 30%, which is probably well below the proportion of women in this profession internationally. The share for women cinematographers is less than 12%, and that of women sound mixers and composers is even less than 7%.
Ages of the directors
The second figure shows the age range of the nineteen directors, divided into 5-year groups according to year of birth:
The oldest is Margarethe von Trotta, director and writer of INGEBORG BACHMANN – REISE IN DIE WÜSTE / JOURNEY INTO THE DESERT. Surprisingly, this is only the second time she has been invited to the Berlinale Competition, the first time was with HELLER WAHN / A LABOUR OF LOVE at the 1983 Berlinale. DAS VERSPRECHEN / THE PROMISE ran out of competition in the 1995 Competition.
Then we have five male directors born between 1948 and 1960; no female director from this age segment was invited. The second oldest director in the Competition is Angela Schanelec (born 1962), represented by the Oedipal drama MUSIC. The youngest is the Korean-Canadian Celine Song, in her early 30s, who is presenting her directorial debut with PAST LIVES.
The ages of the leading actors
A few days ago, the Let’s Change the Picture campaign initiated by German online magazine Palais F*luxx went public. The campaign is about the (in)visibility of women over 47 on German screens. That’s why I’d like to take a look at the age of the first-named roles in the 18 competition films. For the animated films I have taken the age of the dubbing actors. The age of Mwajemi Hussein, who played the role of BlackWoman in THE SURVIVAL OF KINDNESS, is estimated; I have not found any information on her.
No actress reaches the 47-year threshold. Three actors are above it, the oldest being Australian Simon Baker (53) in the mystery-crime film LIMBO (directed, written, cinematographed, edited, music: Ivan Sen). The oldest leading actress is 46-year-old Anabela Moreira in the Portuguese drama MAL VIVER (director and screenwriter: Joao Canijo). It is striking that almost half of the directors in the Competition, namely eight, are older than Simon Baker. Or vice versa: most of the authors do not write stories about or around someone their own age, but about characters who are sometimes much younger.
As an example, let’s take Christian Petzold‘s male-heavy relationship drama RED HEAVEN / AFIRE, which is set in his children’s generation. The main cast consists of four actors (25, 28, 29 and 61 years old) and one actress(27), and according to the Berlinale website the story is “about not being able to sleep and wanting to love, about writing and being read, about being in the world and yet possibly living past it. A film suspended between symbolism and realism, comic and deeply tragic.” Uh-huh. In a way, Petzold (62) is fuelling criticism by Let’s Change the Picture with his work. While he had shot mainly with the now 47-year-old Nina Hoss from 2002-14, since 2018 the 1995-born Paula Beerhas been the favourite for his female lead characters. According to an interview for thefilmstage.com, RED HEAVEN was about (physical) love among young people. But that is still happening in his generation as well, isn’t it?
The pathos of RED HEAVEN – “As the (publisher) turns the corner in the dashing compact car, the forest begins to blaze. Ashes rain down, the sky turns red and the relationship drama, which combines physical intensity and artistic sublimation, takes a turn into a new dimension.” forms the bridge to anotherGerman competition entryIRGENDWANN WERDEN WIR UNS ALLES ERZÄHLEN / SOMEDAY WE’LL TELL EACH OTHER EVERYTHING, directed by Emily Atef: “This film tells of charisma, of naked bodies, of lack of will and longing. Pure, direct, open. Unimagined German romance.“
Perhaps a connection can somehow be made to the festival competition’s claim “It reflects and relates to the world we live in: the films enable viewers to better understand their own place in the world and to respect other people’s point of view.” – but since I haven’t seen the films I can’t say much about it.
Four competition entries tell family stories with three generations:
20.000 ESPECIES DE ABEJAS / 20,000 SPECIES OF BEES by Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren. LE GRAND CHARIOT / THE PLOUGH by Philipp Garrel. MAL VIVER / BAD LIVING by João Canijo. TÓTEM by Lila Avilés.
The first and last of these titles feature the two youngest of the first-named actors, Sofia Otero (8) and Naima Senties(7).
With reservations, because I don’t know any of the films from watching them: I notice that burning issues such as climate change, Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine, femicide, the uprising in Iran, the fates of millions of refugees, the last African colony Western Sahara, growing right-wing populism, the consequences of Brexit, housing shortages, covid, privileged mobility, child labour, forced prostitution, increasing anti-Semitism, conspiracy myths, surveillance societies – to name but a few – leave no trace in the 2023 Competition. But perhaps they will appear in other sections of the festival. John Trengove‘s competition entry MANODROME deals with toxic masculinity. And perhaps the forest fires in Petzold‘s film are due to global warming?
The first four years of the new Berlinale management
On the sidelines of his last Berlinale as festival director, at the Berlinale Event of Women in Film and Television Germany in February 2019, Dieter Kosslick signed the 50/50 by 2020 Pledge, i.e. a commitment to 50:50 gender parity, as the third A-list festival after Cannes and Venice. That year, the proportion of female directors in the Berlinale competition was 43.8%. Speaking to Deutschlandfunk, Kosslick said: “(My successors) see it like I do, otherwise I can’t sign that. (…) I have already agreed this with them.” Does the voluntary commitment have an effect on the competition?
The next figure shows the proportions of women and men in the direction of the competition films of the Chatrian / Rissenbeek era:
The female directors reach around 30 %, the highest value of 31.6 % this year is still less than a third, more than 10 percentage points below the 2019 value. For the 2020 Competition, the Berlinale has calculated a higher value – which I cannot reproduce – (33%). I will briefly go into this at the end of this text.
“The established auteur cinema from all over the world”.
What about the countries of origin of the films? Is the whole world really represented here? Let’s take a look at all the production and co-production countries mentioned in the Competition lists on the Berlinale website, grouped by continent. The Central American and Caribbean countries are counted as North America. All figures refer to the number of countries per continent, not to the number of films:
No film (co-)produced by an African country made it into the competition. And that is not the only gap. The following table shows the directors’ countries of origin, which confirms the trend:
To be able to classify the figures more clearly, here are the tables for the individual countries, again for production and direction. Not a single film from India. The Indian film industry produces 250 films a year. None are good enough for the Berlinale?
Only three times was a director invited from Korea (i.e. South Korea). And it was always the same one, Hong Sangsoo. He has now been nominated six times for a Golden Bear, i.e. in the Competition, and Chatrian has invited him three times in four years alone. Are there any other filmmakers from South Korea who could be considered? Like Hong Sangsoo, Christian Petzold, who is participating for the fourth time this year, is also a Competition nominee. Are their films always of such a high standard that there is no way around them? And there is no room for the films of Sabu, for example? Or the films of directors from Central or South America? There are no films from Eastern Europe in the competition in 2023 either.
Sexiest Man Living in the USA
I imagine the work of the selection committee is anything but easy. But it does sound a bit like “the usual directors” and “the usual countries”. One is tempted to think of the unspeakable “Sexiest Man Alive” award. The previous winners reinforce the suspicion that it is only about the “Sexiest Man from the USA”, whether he was born there or works there – preferably in the film industry:
That is the so-called tunnel vision. And it might prevent a film from India, Africa or South America from being in the competition at the Berlinale. Which is perhaps simply different from what our viewing habits perceive as good – and could be an enrichment.
I have already mentioned Hong Sangsoo (3) and Christian Petzold (2) as frequent guests in the 2020-23 Competition. Apart from them, only Philippe Garrel (2) and RithyPanh (2) have been there more than once under the current direction. And of those who have been in the 2020-23 competition, only Andreas Dresen (4 times since 1999) Denis Coté (4 times since 2013), Francois Ozon (6 times since 2000) Lu Zhang (4 times since 2005) come to more than 3 participations in total. Only men. Do women take longer to produce – perhaps because they have more difficulty financing their projects – and therefore come up with fewer potential invitations? Or are they simply overlooked, passed over? That’s a topic for another day.
If you are going to the Berlinale: have fun, stay healthy, and hopefully see lots of inspiring films. If you don’t go: I’m keeping my fingers crossed for all of us that many films – especially those not in German or English – will be shown in our cinemas after all.
13. November 2022
by SchspIN Comments Off on TATORTE 2022 – Eine gemischte Zwischenbilanz
Heute ist Sonntag der 30. Oktober, es ist kurz nach halb vier am Nachmittag. In den Nachrichten wird von über 150 Toten in Seoul / Südkorea nach einer Massenpanik bei einer Halloweenfeier berichtet. Abends gibt es diesmal keinen TATORT sondern einen POLIZEIRUF 110, der laut ARD-Webseite makabererweise – das konnte die Programmplanung nicht wissen – so beginnt:
Prolog, 30.10.22 Eine Frau wird nach dem Halloweenfest am Fuße des Brockens tot aufgefunden. (…) Die Leiche wurde verbrannt, auf einer Art Scheiterhaufen. Und schließlich stellt sich heraus, dass das Opfer gefoltert wurde – mit Methoden der mittelalterlichen Inquisition.
Der Film von Drehbuchautor Wolfgang Stauch hat den Titel HEXEN BRENNEN, wer die gefolterte und ermordete junge Tanja Edler spielt ist auf der ARD-Webseite und in den üblichen Filmdatenbanken nicht zu finden, sie scheint nur tot und nicht in Rückblenden zu sehen zu sein.
Ändert die ARD ihr Abendprogramm?
Stunden später: Nein, es gab keinen Brennpunkt, weder zu dem Unglück von Seoul, noch zu einer eingestürzten Fußgängerbrücke im Westen Indiens mit mehr als 130 Toten. Zu weit weg, nicht relevant? Im Gegensatz beispielsweise zur Trainerentlassung bei der Männerfußballabteilung von Bayern München am 27.4.09? Die war der ARD einen Brennpunkt wert, aber das ist ein anderes Thema.Continue Reading →
6. October 2022
by SchspIN Comments Off on Series Report 2022 in English at WCOS in København
The World Conference of Screenwriters 2022 (WCOS) is held in Copenhagen on 5 and 6 October 2022, organized by the Danske Dramatikere / Danish Writers Guild.
It is the 5th biennial conference for professional screenwriters from around the world, which was originally planned for 2020, but only possible now due to corona. About 300 participants from 37 countries, most of them organised in their respective screenwriting guilds, came to the Danish Concert Hall in Copenhagen (great archi tecture!) for lectures, interviews and above all panels on various current screenwriting topics, and to network with others during the breaks.
I was invited to participate in the panel A Room of One’s Own? What will it take for Female Voices to be heard?, along with writers Fiona Samuel (Aotearoa / New Zealand) and Jenny Lund Madsen(Denmark) – moderated by Gail Renard (Great Britain), who stepped in for Carolin Otto (Germany, President of the FSE / European Screenwriters’ Association, unfortunately unable to attend).
Among other things, I presented some results from the SERIENSTUDIE / SERIES REPORT 2022 in English, which I am publishing here. The study as a whole is so far only available in German (PDF, 36 pages).
When is it a good Story? – German Film Awards for Screenplay 22
Lola for the Best Screenplay
Lola for the Best Unfilmed Screenplay
Acceptance Speech “But at Second Glance…”
When is it a Good Story?
Cobbler, Stick to your Last
A Cast is more than its Main Characters
Chances for Diverse Writers
Transparent Filmmakers
Breaking New Ground – Think Outside the Box
Who can do it?
They can do it!
Lola for the Best Screenplay
On 24.6.22 the German Film Awards were presented in Berlin. I will analyse the films nominated in all categories in more detail soon, including a 6-departments-check. Today I just want to mention that Thomas Wendrich won the German Film Award for Best Screenplay with LIEBER THOMAS.
But that is not the only screenplay award, because there is also a Lola for the best unfilmed screenplay, and this was presented on 5 July at an event organised by the Screenplay Association (with the unfortunate name VDD Verband Deutscher Drehbuchautoren) and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media BKM Claudia Roth at the Rhineland-Palatinate State Representation – under frighteningly lax corona prevention rules – in front of four hundred invited guests.
Kürzlich, am 23.5.22, wurde ich von der Journalistin Gesa Ufer im Deutschlandradio Kultur für die Sendung Kompressor interviewt. Das Gespräch gibt es zum Nachhören auf der DLF-Webseite (Warum Kommissarinnen häufig sterben müssen). Und wie der Titel schon verrät ging es um das Phänomen der getöteten oder ermordeten Kommissarin, oder wie es harmloser heißt, den Serientod der Figuren.
Ich möchte diesen Hinweis zum Anlass nehmen für eine Aufstellung meiner TATORT-Untersuchungen und Krimi-Gedanken der letzten Jahre; die eine und der andere hat schon öfter nach Texten gefragt, also findet Ihr sie hier gebündelt:
———-
NACHTRAG (Artikel die nach Veröffentlichung dieser Sammlung erschienen sind)
Study on the participation of female writers in the creative areas of script writers, creators, showrunners and headwriters of publically funded and non-funded German series for streamers or VoD providers, private broadcasters and public television.
Belinde Ruth Stieve SchspIN – An Actress’s Thoughts Berlin, May 16, 2022
DownloadSeries Report 2022PDF, 36 pages.
Cite as Stieve, Series Report 22
So far no English version of the report available.
The different participation of women and men on and off screen in the German film and television industry has been a topic of discussion for quite some time. At first, the focus was on directing, while scriptwriters and related fields such as creators of series were often only mentioned in passing and not yet examined in depth. Yet they are the ones who create the stories, the ones who should get the label “a series by”. Consequently, an answer to the question of whether gender imbalance continues to exist in scriptwriting and to what extent is long overdue.
Series of every genre and format are what novels used to be in former days; they entertain, mirror the familiar and can be the “Bildungsroman” of our time. Fictional narratives help to build identities. So it is glaringly important to look at the people in whose minds the characters and stories are created. We have been observing for years that significantly more male authors are commissioned and promoted with series. So we wanted to check if this perception was true.
Kristin Derfler and Annette Hess (Creators, Writers, Creative Producers), who commissioned the Series Report 2022.
It won’t come as a big surprise to regular readers of SchspIN that I’m not a big TATORT fan. In addition, since the escalation of Russia’s years-long war against Ukraine in February 2022, there have been so many news stories of murdered, tortured civilians, raped women, abducted children, that I don’t want to see any more – even fictional – brutal violence against people.
Nevertheless, Germany’s top cop drama TATORT is a good indicator of possible gender imbalances in front of and behind the camera in German television; they are the 90-minute format with the highest budgets, the greatest reputation and the highest measured and extrapolated ratings (which, however, are not without controversy, but that would be a topic for another day). And a statistical view is also possible without having seen TATORTs.
Recently several people approached me, filmmakers from various departments, regarding TATORTs 2021 and what might be the situation regarding the participation of women in the core departments. Therefore, here and today let’s look at the annual 6-departments-check:
The share of female directors is still over 40 %, which is good news. There were 14 female and 19 male directors, including one twice: Torsten C. Fischer for DER TOD DER ANDEREN in Cologne and DER KALTE UND DIE TOTEN in Berlin.
At the same time, however, the share of female writers is again below 20 %, which means that four fifthsof the writers involved were male. They are the ones who ‘invented’ the cases, wrote the stories and developed the events around the investigation teams, some of whom have been solving cases for many years. The question is how much a director can still change in the plot, unless they also wrote the script, were involved in it or had rewriting rights. Their number is surprisingly high.
Four directors were solely responsible for their scripts: Tom Bohn (HETZJAGD) and Martin Eigler (DER BÖSE KÖNIG), both in Ludwigshafen. Petra Lüschow (WER ZÖGERT, IST TOT) in Frankfurt and Niki Stein (MACHT DER FAMILIE) in Hamburg. Co-authors or writers‘ duos were Katharina Bischofwith Johanna Thalmann (LUNA FRISST ODER STIRBT) in Frankfurt, Dietrich Brüggemann with Daniel Bickermann (DAS IST UNSER HAUS) in Stuttgart and Jan Martin Scharf with Arne Nolting (DER REIZ DES BÖSEN) in Cologne. There was no overlap between the two departments in the other 26 Tatorten.
Let‘s investigate the script situation a little further: in the first half of 2021 only two out of twenty scripts were written by women, Elke Schuch wrote RHYTHM AND LOVE (Münster) and Katrin Bühling DIE DRITTE HAUT (Berlin). That’s ten per cent. By the end of the year, five female authors were added, which sounds great at first, because after all, there were only 13 crime scenes in the second half of the year. So just under 40 %? Almost. But not really, because of the five female writers, only Petra Lüschow (WER ZÖGERT, IST TOT. Frankfurt) wrote her TV movie alone. Four TATORTs by women only, two more with female participation. And on the other hand, twenty-seven TATORTs by men and two more in teams with women. That makes a total of 35. No, of course 33. (In fact, I’m trying to keep my spirits up a bit while writing because there is so little positive to report on the scripts, unfortunately.)
Only two authors wrote more than one TATORT script in 2021: Arne Nolting, together with David Sandreuter and Jan Martin Scharf, wrote TÖDLICHE FLUT for Hamburg, and with Jan Martin Scharf DER REIZ DES BÖSEN for Cologne. And Johanna Thalmann, who wrote LUNA FRISST ODER STIRBT with Katharina Bischof, and formed a team with Moritz Binder for DREAMS in Munich.
And what was the situation for female filmmakers in other departments? The proportion of female cinematographers rose above 20 % for the first time since I started these evaluations in 2011, with six female cinematographers, Cornelia Janssen (HETZJAGD and BLIND DATE), Katharina Diessner (WIE ALEREN AUCH), Judith Kaufmann (BOROWSKI UND DER GUTE MENSCH), Julia Daschner (LUNA FRISST ODER STIRBT), Leah Striker (UND IMMER GEWINT DIE NACHT) and Bella Halben (ALLES KOMMT ZURÜCK).
After three zero-years, there is at last onefemale sound mixer in 2021, Antje Volkmann – with whom I have worked already! She pushes the percentage of women to 5.4 %, as she was the sound mixer on two Dresden cases: one on her own (UNSICHTBAR) and one together with Erich Lutz (RETTUNG SO NAH).
Women edited just under 60 %of all TATORTs and took part as composers in, er, 4 %. The music for the 35 TATORTs was composed by two women and 48 men: Iva Zabkar, solely responsible for VERSCHWÖRUNG in Vienna, and Jasmin Shakeri in Bremen (NEUGEBOREN) together with the duo Beathoavenz.
As always, I also did a roles analysis of the first-named characters and the main cast, i.e. the actors named on the ARD website. Good statistical news: the proportion of women among the first-named roles, i.e. the respective number one on the cast sheet, is 45.5 %. And – even more astonishing – the proportion of women in the main cast is 46.9 %. So there has been quite a bit of change.
I don’t know what these roles did and said because I don’t know the scripts or the films. However, the ARD website provides a short description of the plot for each case, and I would like to conclude with this.
Always a favourite: Dead Young Women
The presumed favourite corpse group of German crime scriptwriters are the “young women”, so probably the 14- to under 25-year-olds. This can be seen again and again in TATORTs and other TV thrillers (see also TV Cop Dramas – Actresses can do more than play Victims. SchspIN 12.2.2020)
In four of the thirty-three 2021 TATORTs the murder victim is described as a “young woman” (see the synopses on the ARD channel’s website), additionally there are two murdered women aged 18 and 19 who are mentioned by (first) name and profession. The following sentences are the first sentences of the descriptions:
After a fire in the basement of the Gerberzentrum, a high-rise housing estate in Dortmund, the charred body of a young woman is found.
The abused body of a young woman is found on a wasteland near a popular club in Kiel.
Alarm in Kiel: During a riot in the forensic clinic, the woman-murderer Kai Korthals manages to escape from security custody. (…) 2nd paragraph: Then the body of a young woman is found on the shore of a lake.
A Weekend in Berlin: Partygoers and revelers wander the wintry streets in search of an unforgettable night. A young woman finds a suitable date in the couple Dennis Ziegler and Julia Hoff via a dating app. The next morning, a body is found near Dennis’ flat. Her face is disfigured so that identification seems impossible.
Schoolgirl Jessi (18) has a date. But not at the disco, she sets off for the nearby forest on the outskirts of town. A short time later she is dead.
After the release party for her debut novel, 19-year-old author Luise Nathan is found dead.
Six out of 33 cases, that is about 20 %, every fifth TATORT film. In German reality, according to the German police crime statistics for 2020 – the one for 2021 has not yet been published – girls and women aged 14 to 25 account for only 6.6 % of all murder victims.
Another TATORT murder victim was under 30:
Sudden cardiac arrest at only 29: Anna Schneider collapses dead in broad daylight on the street outside her café.
Another murdered woman, a little older:
Four weeks earlier, the members of the Oase Ostfildern building community moved into their building and already the foundation has to be dug up again because of a leakage problem. An even bigger problem comes to light: an unidentifiable female corpse.
The description on Wikipedia adds that it was an approximately 40-year-old woman. Two other murdered women are presumed to be a similar age:
Susanne Elvan met her husband Tarek, a convicted violent criminal, via a pen pal portal during his imprisonment. The wedding took place before his release. When Susanne is found murdered, Tarek had just been released earlier.
The actress Neshe Demirwas 42 years old at the time of the shooting.
Someone anonymously reports the discovery of a dead body in a desolate residential area in the early hours of the morning. Jana Gruber has been assaulted and brutally killed in her house. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the woman worked as a prostitute and that she had a child.
First “brutally killed“, shortly afterwards “a prostitute“. Another classic TV stereotype for murdered women. The actress Susi Ramberger was also 42 years old when the film was shot.
German Criminal Statistics for 2020
The following diagram shows Germany’s reality concerning the age distribution of murdered women and men. By far the largest group in 2020 were women aged 60 or older, they accounted for 17.5 % of all murdered women and men. How many of them may have been victims of domestic violence, were killed by their husbands or their sons?
fd
6. April 2022
by SchspIN Comments Off on Demand Change (from: The Age Buster)
In December 2021, I was interviewed by Italian journalist, sociologist and author Stefania Medetti. She currently lives in Thailand and runs, among other things, the English-language blog The Age Buster, which focuses on the topics of age, age valuation and ageism / age discrimination. The interview along with Stefania‘s introductory text about her experiences in Germany were published on 13 Jan 22 under the title Demand Change.
With Stefania’s kind permission, I am publishing the German version today. Grazie sincero!
Stefania Medetti
Demand Change
It was all because of my love for cats that on a frosty St. Valentine’s morning I found myself under the high arches of the Milan Central Station. Standing in front of the train that would have taken me to Germany, I looked at the tracks extending outside the building in a foggy, yellow-pale light. I thought about my grandmother who, a fifteen-year old, got on a steam-engine train to come to the city to work as a maid. Two generations later, a bit older then her, I was traveling in the direction she came from (she was born on the border with Austria) to work as an au pair and improve my German. The family wanted a Spanish candidate, but in my introductory letter I mentioned cats and this convinced them I was a good fit anyway. As the train travelled east and then northeast, the plains first and the vineyards later passed in front of my window. When the train reached the Alps, we travelled through a narrow valley between two high walls of mountains and then the names of the railway signs were written in German.
12 Film Festivals 2019-21: Share of Women Directors, Writers and Cinematographers in Competitions
To start the year, I would like to present a film festival analysis. It deals with the proportions of women in directing, scripts and cinematography – the so-called 3-departments-check – in the main competitions of twelve German film festivals.
I briefly considered evaluating music / composers. But since music, similar to sound, is listed very incompletely (both on film websites and in databases) the research would have been very time-consuming and just beyond the scope of my capacities.
The first table shows the festivals and the number of films in their main competition in the three years examined. The majority were feature films, you’ll find the number of documentaries in brackets:
Evaluation
Method
Most festivals provide programme notes or film lists on their websites, often in the digital archive, from which at least the film title and often also the director can be seen. More detailed information is often available, including synopses and a short biography of the director, as well as other team positions. In some cases, friendly and helpful staff members have sent me lists or links. (All enquiries were answered promptly!).
I was able to complete the information on the three trades mostly via the IMDB database, the question about the gender of the filmmakers came partly from the short biographies on the festival pages (director), supplemented from IMDB (author and DoP), and some film websites, interviews or through further online research.
Out of a total of 401 competition entries, I only failed to identify a position twice, both times it was the DoP. That is 0.5 % of all (401 x 3) positions. (These are only the feature-length films, i.e. not counting the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, where 153 films were shown in the competitions).
For some documentaries, I could only determine the director and DoP, no matter how thoroughly I searched. In these cases, I took the director’s entries for the script as well.
A gap in the table can be found at the Hof Film Festival. They don’t have a competition in the conventional sense, but: “It has to be the first feature-length film (feature film) by a filmmaker. In accordance with this criterion, the Hof Film Festival sifts through all the films submitted (…)” (information from Sabine Reiter, Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts). Unfortunately, the corresponding lists are not available through the festival office, nor can they be found on the website. I have been promised that I will still receive the information and will then complete this evaluation.
Another gap is due to the fact that there was the Munich Film Festival did not take place in 2020. Other festivals were held online and had smaller competition compared to pre-pandemic years.
Due to the mass of an average of 51 films in competition at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival and the special short film situation, I had to make the decision to only evaluate the position of director from this festival. For some films, screenplay and camera were also available; for example, in 2019, for 26 of the 53 competition films the festival website provided information on scirpt, and 24 films on camera. That’s less than 50% for both. For most films – including those of other years – these items are missing, and they are also not listed on IMDB and other online sources. In the case of short films, the script is often written by the director, who often also films the short, though if this is not explicitly stated anywhere I can’t take it for granted. And I cannot contact 153 filmmakers on these issues.
Hypothesis
My initial assumption was that the proportion of women directors and screenwriters is highest in competitions with first to third feature films (Saarbrücken, Hof), documentaries (Leipzig, Munich Doku) and short films (Oberhausen). And that the proportion of women cinematographers is higher in documentaries and short films than in long feature films.
I also wanted to check whether the assumption that in cinema the directors always write the scripts as well is true. And thus the tag “a film by” is even more true here than in television, where there are significantly more independent, non-directing authors.
Results
In the diagrammes, I replaced the festival names with the respective cities, I added D (documentary film festival) and F (film festival) to the two Munich festivals and slightly abbreviated Mannheim-Heidelberg.
The following tables show how many of the competition films had no women at all in directing, screenwriting and cinematography, or how many had only women in all three sections. Values above 50 % are highlighted in each case.
You can see that 2019 was the year with the fewest competitions with films involving women in the three departments. However, this does not apply to all festivals, see Berlin for example.
In general, there is a focus on female directors at festivals within the industry and the media, but I cannot say whether this applies to all festivals and wherer it is also a topic within the festival organisation, whether there are even considerations about voluntary commitments or the like. In this respect, my evaluation may be about something that is perhaps not a topic or goal at the festival itself: gender equality. Nor do I know how many films applied to the festivals in each case and what their composition was in the three departments. It is not possible to speculate on whether films by women (= director and screenplay) are favoured or disadvantaged or treated equally in the application process.
In 2021, there were still three festivals where half the films had only men in the the three departments; For Munich Film Festival, this was the case with eight out of ten films. The second table has a lot of zeros, which means: no film in the competition with a female director, writer and cinematographer. Whereas even one participation, a collaboration with men at the head of the deaprtment, would have been enough to qualify. Documentaries in particular often have several DoP’s, and there are also teams in the screenplay section. Nevertheless, zeros en masse, the highest value of 25 %, i.e. every fourth film with women in all three departments, can be found at the goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Films Wiesbaden 2020. In 2019 it was already 23.5 %(= second highest value), but in 2021 only 5.9 %. Let’s wait and see what it looks like this year.
As I said, there are twelve festivals, three departments and three years each. This is difficult to represent in one figure, so it is divided into nine diagrammes. Each year separately, the three trades separately, and the festivals arranged according to the number of women. (To enlarge and browse, simply click on an image):
The same figures, only separated by festival, are shown in the next eleven charts (Hof is still missing), Cottbus and Munich Film Festival are competing for last place, and even Hamburg doesn’t do as well as I would like as someone from Hamburg.
Directors
(subchapter added Jan 27).
In the total of 554 films in all eleven competitions 2019-21 (Hof is still pending, as mentioned), 254 were directed by women and 365 by men. That’s a total of 619, significantly more than there were films, which is due to the fact that some films – not only documentaries – had directing teams.
The average proportions of women directors through all 11 festival competitions were: 32.1% in 2019, 45.8% in 2020 and 37.9%in 2021.
Phrases like “films by women directors” are problematic as long as it is not clear what exactly is being talked about. Films by one female director? Several women directors? Films with mixed teams of women and men directors?
The average of all festival averages for the proportion of women directors is 37.7 %. But if I only count the films in which one or more female directors directed without a male director, then their share is 32.8 %. Or perhaps to put it in more understandable terms:
In the 11 German film festivals in total, just under a third (32.8 %) of the films screened in the main competitions from 2019 to 2021 were directed exclusively by women.
Auteur films
And finally, the answer to the question about auteur films: yes, it looks quite different from (German) television. In very few films (this is the first value in each series of three) the director is not involved in the script at all. The second value – usually the highest – shows the films in which the directors wrote the screenplay alone or as a directing duo. The third number shows the scripts written by the director in collaboration with other authors.
I hope to receive the titles of the films that qualified for the Hof Gold Award soon. Then I can add them to this analysis, and perhaps also evaluate the first-named cast members of the feature films.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincere thanks to May Ho Ho, Berlin, for gender research assistance with some Chinese filmmakers, and to Aki Sato-Johnson, Toga / Japan, for clarifying a Japanese filmmaker.
Furthermore, many thanks to Angela Heuser, Dramaturg (VeDRA), who confirmed my approach in dealing with unstated script positions in documentaries.
Also many thanks to Dario Becker / Filmfest Hamburg, Sabine Niewalda / Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and Anne Thomé / DOK.fest München for catalogues, film lists and notes on the competitions on the festival pages. Special thanks to Sebastian Hammer / Film Festival Cologne for film lists and links to all competition films of the three years.
My net working time on this study, including the German and English publication, was 63:47 hours.
