By Travis Johnson
Last night’s AACTA Awards Red Carpet was disrupted by a group of women dressed as sausages, calling on the Australian film industry to “end the sausage party” and address the issue of gender disparity in the Australian screen community. The protesters are members of WIFT NSW – Women in Film and Television, an activist and advocacy group dedicated to improving the position and representation of women in the film and television industries. We reached out to WIFT President, Sophie Mathisen, for some insight into their agenda and their plans moving forward.
What was the aim of the protest? What did you want to achieve with your actions?
We really wanted to raise awareness for the low instance of female nominations this year and just to really highlight that the entry and eligibility criteria is quite opaque. We found that seven out of the 28 films that were pre-selected actually didn’t fulfill the eligibility criteria and also combined with the fact that AACTA, for the first time ever, released a second tier of films that were eligible. AACTA couldn’t release to us on what metrics they were chosen. We were just told that it was “strong industry demand”. We had a number of members who had submitted their films on advice from AACTA – AACTA had approached them – and when they weren’t even selected for the pre-selection tour, that was a real slap in the face. So we really wanted to say there is something going on in the industry. We wanted to say that we know this is in existence, we know that it exists on a number of different rungs, so we just wanted to poke fun at it, make it a little bit funny, but also highlight the gender inequality.
Would you say there is a deliberate attempt to exclude female voices in the industry, or is this a result of a background culture of discrimination that some people are perhaps unaware of?
I think it’s definitely the latter. I don’t think that there is a group of men conspiring in a room. When we look at the fact that the specifics of female engagement in the industry have had no significant shift in 40 years, then of course we’re looking at strong institutionalised and cultural biases, and a lot of those biases are unconscious. It’s just the way in which men work with one another and it’s not deliberate but I think it’s really significant coming off the back of Deb Verhoeven’s research that she just published in The Conversation, looking at what she calls “gender offenders”, the 40% of male producers who work with no women in key creative roles – that’s something that’s really, really stark for us.
Screen Australia recently launched a number of initiatives aimed at female film practitioners under the umbrella title, Gender Matters. Surely this is a step in the right direction?
I think that Gender Matters is a step. I don’t think that it’s enough. When we look at strong institutionalised bias we need to look at legislation and we need to look at regulation to really make a significant dent. One of the things we noticed was that the people receiving Gender Matters funding were already receiving mainstream funding – how many people in the emerging space are breaking through? I know there was a number of women that for the first time received funding, but it is also really difficult and hard for us to ignore that that is the most amount of submissions they’ve gotten for any program ever – 348 submissions. And what happens to the women who are not successful? It’s not good enough to have a one-off initiative. We at WIFT feel that a 50/50 quota is the only way that it’s going to shift, and it’s going to shift immediately. We know that in the Swedish Film Institute they have reached gender parity by instituting a quota, and that happened in under two years. So when we look at immediate action and immediate steps that need to be taken, it needs to be a quota.
On your website, you say that this action is the result of a change in the WIFT NSW committee. Should we expect more such actions in the future?
Absolutely. I think we have to take a really active role – we are there to agitate for change. When myself and the new WIFT committee took over we said “we are working towards self-destruction.” We do not want to exist anymore. It should just be 50/50, and that’s it. We are gonna be very active because we are filmmakers as well – we just want to get on with the business of making our films. We don’t want to have to fight for our right to do that – we jut want to get on with the business.
For more information, head over to the WIFT NSW website.
