Last year saw a milestone in gender parity on screen: For the first time in recent history, the top earning films of the year were split equally between movies led by male characters and female characters, according to an annual tracker.
Still, women directed just 16% of last year’s 250 highest grossing movies, according to another annual report that follows those statistics.
One Washington group is aiming to change the ratio of women behind the camera. The Emerging Filmmakers Program is aimed at women looking to break into the film business.
Recipients will get funding for a project, mentorship with industry professionals and paid apprenticeships so they can earn a livable wage while learning the tools of the trade.
Applicants have until Feb. 28 to submit their materials.
SPR’s Owen Henderson sat down with the leaders of the organization responsible for launching the program.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
RACHEL NOLL JAMES: I am Rachel Noll James, she/her pronouns, and I am one of the co-founders of Emergence Films.
SIENNA BECKMAN: I'm Sienna Beckman, my pronouns are she/they, and I'm also a co-founder of Emergence Films.
Emergence Films is a development and production company. We're based in the U.S. in Washington State, and in London, in the UK, and we are a company that supports and champions female-identifying filmmakers, as well as historically underrepresented storytellers from anywhere around the world.
So we're really passionate about uplifting underrepresented perspectives and giving opportunities that are creative and meaningful and financial to people who haven't necessarily been given them in the past.
And we're really excited to start the Emerging Filmmakers program. This is the first year that we're doing it, and that is also looking to support female-identifying early career filmmakers.
So our main goal is to try to make the inroads into the film and TV industry a little bit smoother and a little bit more supported. In the past, it's been fairly exclusive, and it's something that, you know, feels like there's a lot of gatekeepers. It's not very easy to break into the industry. So we want to create opportunities to make that a little bit easier for people.
With the program, we're offering skills training, a paid apprenticeship on a professional film set, an industry mentor, and also creative development for first projects for our participants, so a short film and then their first feature. And we're also offering funding and fundraising support through that process.
RNJ: You know, this program was born out of sort of a shared passion of Sienna and mine. You know, we started out of the industry in LA, you know, 10-plus — 15 years ago-ish.
And, you know, for both of us in kind of our separate tracks, it just felt like there was so little support. We would be one of one or two women on set. It didn't really feel safe to ask questions.
We kind of learned just by being thrown into the deep end, kind of with no idea what we were doing. And so I think a big part of this program for us is we want to provide that sort of mentality of like, ‘As we rise, we raise the next generation up beneath us,’ and hopefully they will do the same. Because when we help each other, when we support each other, everybody wins.
And so to create an environment where people feel safe to ask questions, where they feel more represented in the room, and just that they can learn. And it's an environment that is set up for learning and success, as opposed to like, think or swim, you know, we don't care either way, which is kind of the attitude it's been, I think, for a lot of years.
And so we kind of — we founded a version of Emergence Films in LA, and it's adapted a lot. Sienna moved to London, I moved up here to Washington, and she learned a lot, you know, working in the sort of the European market and the way they handle film financing and stuff is very different.
So there's a lot of learning that we were able to glean from that. And then moving up to Washington, which has had less of a film infrastructure, but it's been really exciting for me to be part of seeing it kind of taking form again up here and getting involved with the players involved in that.
And it's just so inspiring and beautiful up here. So the last two features we shot were local to Washington. And I have now, I think both of us have, become very passionate about being part of bringing this film infrastructure and more film to Washington, specifically giving opportunity to women in Washington who maybe have felt historically like you don't have opportunity to do this work up here and to show them that yes, we can and we're building it together. So let's go.
So that's, that's been really exciting in the last few years.
OWEN HENDERSON: So this program functions as a patron rather than an investor. Explain that distinction for our listeners.
RNJ: So Sienna and I stumbled into kind of an amazing opportunity when I first moved up here, and I live on Bainbridge Island. And so I kind of — I found myself in this community.
I didn't really know that many people, but Bainbridge is a community that really values the arts. And I have found that to be true around a lot of the places in Washington that I have now gotten more familiar with, but a community that values the arts and primarily operates in the sort of patron-artist dynamic.
You know, there's a lot of nonprofits on the island, you know, museums and theater companies and all manner of things that people are donating money to and keeping the arts alive on the island.
And so it's full of arts patrons and donors. So when I — I had this film idea for this film “Ingress” that we shot in 2021. And I sat down with one of the few people I'd met at that point.
And I said, ‘Hey, I'm, I'm interested in fundraising for this film. Where would you suggest I even begin?’ This person said to me, ‘Well, in this community, don't ask people to invest, ask them to donate,’ which was, you know, completely new to me coming from LA and that world.
So we got a fiscal sponsor and I, you know, started sitting down with people over coffee and kind of presenting the idea. And I ended up raising the majority of the production budget for this film through tax deductible donations.
And what was so beautiful about it for me as a filmmaker is rather than sitting in rooms with investors where I had to essentially convince them that I was a bankable — which as a first time feature director, they weren't going to think I was no matter how well I sold myself, you know, ‘This will make you money. This will sell in China,’ like all these things we have to play in these games of these boxes.
Instead, it was a conversation of, ‘Here's what I'm passionate about. Here's what the story means to me. Here's what we're doing to empower local community and education for local students’ and all this stuff.
And then it's like, people were contributing from a space of, ‘I believe in this thing you're doing, go do it.’ And then I had this incredible freedom. I'd never felt before to just go make this weird, unusual story I wanted to make.
And as soon as we'd gone through that experience, Sienna and I were like, ‘There's something here’ because film has become this weird outlier in the art space where the majority of arts are donor backed nonprofits for a reason.
But film has become this sort of other entity that's always been about profit and huge amounts of money going through the system. And so it's like, we became really passionate about, ‘Well, how can we create other channels where film can thrive as an art form again?’ And I think a big part of that is changing people's perspectives around why film is important. And it's not just about making profit. It's about empowering perspectives and storytelling in the same way that these other art forms are.
SB: Especially when a filmmaker is just starting out, that's the most difficult time to raise money because they don't have a track record. They haven't had much experience, which is fine because everybody has to start somewhere.
But if you go to an investor, an investor is thinking about their profit bottom line. So they're saying, ‘How are you going to make my money back?’
So that means that that filmmaker needs to be thinking in that commercial mindset, also. ‘How am I going to sell this movie? Is it going to make money? How do I play this game?’ Which is fine.
And obviously it's worked for a lot of people, but it limits — it greatly limits the creativity that a filmmaker can have because something that is quote unquote commercial is usually quite narrow in terms of, especially at an early filmmaker, you know — there's not, not a lot of creativity there.
So what we decided and in this experience that we had to be able to open that much wider to the filmmakers and to say, ‘We believe in your creativity, and we want you to feel free to tell whatever story you want to tell without having to think about how am I going to make this money back?’
Just to kind of, especially as an early career filmmaker, to be able to learn who they are as a storyteller, what stories they're interested in to have that freedom is what we think is really important, especially at that early career time.
OH: So why is this program focused on women behind the camera?
SB: I think they kind of go hand in hand because when you get more women behind the camera, you tend to also have more women in front of the camera. So it kind of, as Rachel said earlier, like when one person wins, we all win. It's a win for everybody in the community.
But I think one of the things that I think is really important for me personally as a producer is that where the stories are coming from, so the perspectives, the backgrounds, because a film starts with an idea, right? An idea turns into a story, it turns into characters, and then it kind of grows from there.
So if the people who are having the ideas and thinking up these stories are women or people from historically marginalized perspectives, then that almost always means that it translates on screen as well. So it kind of, from that genesis, it builds and it can kind of grow from there.
RNJ: And I would just add that perspective is so critically important. And I know there's been a lot of stuff in the news right now about “Emilia Pérez” and that movie, and how the director being a cis white male telling the story actually had some problematic edges to it.
And I think we've had a history of cis white males telling stories from all the perspectives, but they are only one perspective. And it's a valuable perspective, and it's an important one. But the problem is it's been almost exclusively the only one. And because of that, we have a very narrow view of the world we live in.
And so, you know, with our specific focus on female storytellers, it's like — that female perspective is so important. Seeing the world through the eyes of someone else creates empathy, and it creates more understanding of the way the world works.
And I just — as an industry and as a world, we need more perspectives, and we need more stories from those perspectives to open up our eyes to what's really going on in the world.
And I think that it's more than ever now, it's just, it's so important that people are feeling empowered to share their experience.
OH: What would a program like this have meant for each of you when you were getting started?
RNJ: It would have been dreamy, man. I mean, look, like, we huffed it, like, I figured it out. And I'm proud of, you know, 22-year-old Rachel for going out into the world and boldly trying things.
And I mean, my first feature film experience was both wonderful and, like, deeply traumatic on a number of levels, because I didn't know what I was doing. And there were some things that went down that I just was very ill-equipped to deal with.
But I learned through them. We all do. But I think having, especially like an older woman to mentor me and to show me the ropes and be a safe space to ask questions, it would have been a game changer.
SB: Yeah, I think when Rachel and I were building this and developing this program, we had that in mind. We were like, ‘What would we have wanted as people who are just entering the industry?’
And yes, you know, we are looking at younger women, but we're saying early career, because we don't necessarily want it to be only young people, because anybody should feel that they can learn about filmmaking at whatever point in their life they are.
But we want this to be something that really builds a strong foundation for people who are just entering the industry, because the film and TV industry historically is very cagey with information. It's ‘Oh, you know, this is my contact.’ It's all very kind of tight fisted.
And we want to open those fists, especially if when it comes to information, when it comes to learning and experiences and gaining more confidence and more just everything, you know, to be able to set that strong foundation for people to say, ‘Okay, I've had I have people that I can ask questions to I've had experience on set, I've developed something creatively and put it through production and put it through post and I've finished a film and I have more contacts and a community and peers that I can turn to for support.’
We want all to kind of give the foundation of all of that. So it's a strong building block that they can jump off of.
RNJ: This industry has historically put women in a very strange position of feeling innately competitive with each other, because it feels like, ‘If you have the job, then I don't. So you're my competition.’
And there was a lot when I was, you know, first starting out in the industry, there were women I knew, who had been working in the industry a long time, but their attitude was not ‘Let me help you.’ It was ‘Well, no one helped me. So figure it out.’
I remember telling myself when that would happen, like, ‘You know what, if I am ever in a position where a woman comes to me and asks for help, and I can help, I am going to help because it costs me nothing.’
And so bringing it back to that space of collaboration and community and helping each other. I think that's how we're going to shift this industry.
