Of the 240 highest grossing Brazilian films from 1995 to 2018, 21% were directed by women<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The low number of women in leadership roles in cinema is not exclusive to Brazil. In 2014, a study commissioned by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media (USA) and conducted by the University of Southern California in 11 countries revealed that, in China, 16.7% of films were directed by women; in Australia, 8.3% of films were female led. On the other hand, the study “The celluloid ceiling,\u201d developed by Martha Lauzen, a professor of film and television at San Diego State University, found that 20% of directing, writing, producing, editing, and cinematography jobs with the 100 top-grossing films in the United States in 2019 were held by women. The Academy Awards reflect this inequality. Although they began in the 1920s, the first time a woman won an Oscar for Best Director for a feature film was in 2010: Kathryn Bigelow, for War on Terror<\/em>. “In general, women struggle to achieve positions of leadership, and cinema is no different,” says producer Deborah Ivanov, former director of the Brazilian Cinema Agency (ANCINE) and now leader of More Women in the Brazilian Film Industry, a group established last year by 90 industry professionals. “It is a vicious cycle: men are hired to direct and write feature films because they are more experienced, while women remain in the background because they are less experienced in directing.”<\/p>\n
The situation is even worse for Black women, as pointed out by political scientist Marcia Rangel Candido, associated researcher at the Affirmative Action Multidisciplinary Studies Group, from Rio de Janeiro State University (GEMAA-UERJ). Established in 2014, the group records diversity in Brazilian cinema. Its latest survey showed that 21% of the directors of the 240 highest grossing Brazilian films from 1995 to 2018 were female. None of them were Black. “This inequality cannot be explained away by a lack of professionals in the Brazilian film market: Black women are out there and report facing challenges getting funding and distribution,\u201d says Candido. “Research shows that the Brazilian film market is dominated by white men and does not represent our diversity. The goal is that these data help foster more public policies on gender and racial equality in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Publicity \/\u2009Edileuza Penha de Souza<\/span><\/a> A still from the short film Filhas de lavadeiras<\/em>, by Edileuza Penha de SouzaPublicity \/\u2009Edileuza Penha de Souza<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n
Historian Edileuza Penha de Souza, from the Center for Afro-Brazilian Studies at the University of Bras\u00edlia (UnB), agrees. In 2012, during her PhD research, she noticed that her findings for a chapter on Black cinema contained no female directors of feature-length films. “As a Black woman, I was very distressed to discover such a gap, and even though this was not the main focus of my research, I decided to dive deeper into the history of Brazilian cinema in search of Black female directors,\u201d recalls Souza, a documentary filmmaker herself and a professor at the Recanto das Emas<\/em> campus of the Federal Institute of Education, Science, and Technology of Brasilia (IFB), which focuses on technical education in film. On a website about women in Brazilian cinema, she came across a photo of Ad\u00e9lia Sampaio and, through social media, got in touch with the filmmaker\u2014a Minas Gerais native based in Rio de Janeiro.<\/p>\n
According to the researcher, Sampaio is the first female Black filmmaker in Brazil. “She started out in the film industry in the late 1960s, as an operator at Difilm, a Cinema Novo<\/em> (New Cinema) distributor founded by producer Luiz Carlos Barreto. She then wrote scripts and directed short films. In 1984, she commercially released the feature film Amor Maldito<\/em> (Cursed Love)\u2014a first for a Black woman up until that point.\u201d Since 2016, Souza has been organizing the Ad\u00e9lia Sampaio Competitive Black Cinema Exhibition at UnB. “Our goal is to give visibility to the work of Black filmmakers, who still face the most significant challenges when seeking support for their films,\u201d she explains. “Ad\u00e9lia\u2019s career is inspiring in this sense. At 76, she is still fighting to make her films,\u201d points out the director of Filhas de lavadeiras <\/em>(Daughters of washerwomen), which won Best Brazilian Short Film in the international documentary festival It\u2019s All True, in 2020.<\/p>\n
Indigenous filmmakers are even rarer. In her PhD thesis on gender and racial hierarchies in contemporary filmmaking, defended in 2019 at the ENCE-IBGE, Paula Alves found that, of the 1,851 directors of 2,558 films analyzed from 1995 to 2016, only eight (0.4%) of them were indigenous: seven men and one woman. “In Brazil, the interest in films made by indigenous women is very recent,” says Clarisse Alvarenga, from the Federal University of Minas Gerais School of Education (FAE-UFMG). “Only in the last decade have they gained prominence and made a significant number of films.” During her postdoctoral studies at the National Museum, Alvarenga studied the production of Brazilian filmmakers, including Ayani Huni Kuin, from the Huni Kuin people, and Patricia Ferreira Para Yxapy, from the Mby\u00e1-Guarani people, as well as Navajo filmmaker Arlene Bowman, who lives in California, United States. Honored at the 2020 Cab\u00edria Festival \u2013 Mulheres & Audiovisual<\/em> (Cab\u00edria Festival \u2013 Women & Film), in S\u00e3o Paulo, Yxapy showed 11 films at the event, including Teko Haxy \u2013 Ser imperfeita<\/em> (Teko Haxy \u2013 Being imperfect) (2018), co-directed with researcher and visual artist Sophia Pinheiro. “The growing dialogue between indigenous women and researchers, curators, and other filmmakers makes cinema more diverse, more complex, and helps give these women voices and more opportunities to make films,” says Alvarenga.<\/p>\n
Sophia Pinheiro\u2009\/\u2009Publicity <\/span><\/a> Director Patr\u00edcia Ferreira Par\u00e1 Yxapy, from the Mby\u00e1-Guarani peopleSophia Pinheiro\u2009\/\u2009Publicity <\/span><\/p><\/div>\n
Academic criticism on women-directed films flourished in the 1970s in Europe and the United States, boosting scientific research on the subject. “This took place alongside an increase in the number of women working in film, including in leadership positions,” says Karla Holanda, professor of Film and Audiovisual Studies of the Fluminense Federal University (UFF). Holanda believes one reason for this was the creation of the International Women’s Year, in 1975, and the Decade for Women (1976\u20131985), both established by the United Nations (UN). “By encouraging artistic and cultural projects, these initiatives helped women gain prominence around the world, including in the movies,\u201d she points out. \u201cAnother positive point was the establishment of film programs in Brazilian universities, such as the University of S\u00e3o Paulo, in 1967, and UFF, in 1968.”<\/p>\n
In Brazil, a pioneering study was released in 1982: the book As musas da matin\u00ea<\/em> (Matinee muses), by Elice Munerato and Maria Helena Darcy de Oliveira, published by Rioarte. In it, the two researchers list 21 feature films made by women and commercially released in the country before 1979, such as O \u00e9brio <\/em>(The drunkard) (1946), by Gilda de Abreu (1904\u20131979), and Mar de rosas<\/em> (Sea of roses) (1977), by Ana Carolina. Later, in 1989, the School of Communication at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Image and Sound published Quase cat\u00e1logo 1: Realizadoras de cinema no Brasil <\/em>(1930\u20131988<\/em>) (Almost catalogue 1: Female filmmakers in Brazil), organized by Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda, today a UFRJ professor emeritus.<\/p>\n
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