PRINTYoung Columbia filmmakers participate in Citizen Jane Film Academy
These leading ladies use their passion to confront gender gaps in the film industry.
Ally Appelbaum
Randi Noyes, Courtney Callahan, Sarah Freyermuth & Fariha Rashid
September 29, 2011 | 12:00 a.m. CST
A Filmmaker's Battle
In a dark, cold and lonely room that had the feel of a prison, Sarah Freyermuth hunched over a keyboard. After four hours without food, water or company, the editing room had become a different world. For five days, she had practiced this ritual of solitude. Trying to recharge her frozen body like a solar panel, she would literally bask in the sun when she caught a rare glimpse of it. After 15 hours of painstaking cuts, cross dissolves, fade-ins and framing, Freyermuth emerged, slightly famished and exhausted but victorious nonetheless.
Freyermuth, 14, has a quiet but strong presence when she walks into a room. With a head full of blond hair, a smile that won’t fade and a truly genuine friendliness, you can’t help but smile back at her.
Unable to contain her excitement, she ran to Kerri Yost, her teacher, mentor and moral support for the summer, and hugged her with all her might.
“It’s hard to make a film better than you think it’s going to be,” Yost told her, “but you managed to.”
Freyermuth recalls this story with all of the emotion she experienced in the moment: trying to keep her voice down as she exclaims, “I’m finally done!” and sighing an “Oh, my gosh,” when things slow down at the close.
Yost, a teacher at the Citizen Jane Film Academy, can empathize with the young filmmakers’ emotions. “Every film is like climbing Mount Everest,” she says.
Yost is no newbie to the film industry. She moved to London right out of college and lived with four male filmmaking friends. She was often the only woman on set, save for the makeup artists and hairdressers, but she never thought much of it. Even in Poland, where she later moved and co-founded a production company, her only female colleague was her co-producer. Despite this fact, Yost says Europe nurtured her efforts regardless of her gender. It was typical of the art scene: cities crawling with creators, performers packed into every corner — imagine sharing walls with an opera singer — and an atmosphere of communal support. It wasn’t until Yost moved back to the United States that she understood the scope of male domination.
While working in Chicago, she saw that a lack of female role models in the big film industry was keeping women out of the business. However, Yost found a haven in Stephens College. “I remember the first time I walked into our studio, everyone in the class was a woman, and it just struck me,” she says. Now, in her work as the school’s chair of digital film and media, she hopes to be an example for aspiring filmmakers.
Part of the Minority
This summer, Freyermuth and 23 other eighth- and ninth-grade girls, made up the inaugural class of the Citizen Jane Film Academy. One of only three women’s colleges in the U.S. offering a film production degree, Stephens was the perfect stage for the academy to play out. Co-headed by Yost and her colleague Amy Drtina, the summer workshop was an extension of the Citizen Jane Film Festival. There was no audition process or admission requirement to join the academy, just a desire to learn.
The festival has been championing women in film since it began as the Fem Film Symposium in 2006. It has come a long way since the days of approximately 300 attendees and one feature film — a small, intimate affair. The public wanted in, so in 2008, the festival was born. Since then, it has grown, and this year it includes 14 films, five shorts compilations and a free opening ceremony complete with tightrope walkers, aerialists and fire spinners as part of its Cirque Du Cinema theme.
Yost’s experiences as a female filmmaking minority have been verified with sobering research. Since 1998, Martha M. Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film, has put out a widely cited gender breakdown of film occupations. Her results have never been comforting, but in Yost’s words, the latest numbers are “worrisome.”
All of Lauzen’s figures in the “Celluloid Ceiling” reports are based on the top 250 domestic grossing films of a given year.
Last year, women occupied 16 percent of the cinematography, directing, writing, producing and editing jobs in the big film industry.
Women called the shots in just 11 percent of the top films of 2000, their best year as directors. Last year, that percentage dropped to 7 percent.
Hollywood’s elite is just as exclusive of women, and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is arguably its biggest old boys club. Of the 43 governors responsible for inviting new members, six are women.
In an email response, a spokesperson for the Academy declined to provide a gender breakdown of its nearly 6,000 members: the Academy “does not give out that kind of demographic information,” it states. It does, however, release the names of its invitees for membership each year. In 2010, invitations were sent to 96 men, 38 women and one band. This year’s guest list is even worse: 123 men and 55 women.
A Call to Action
The gender gap in Hollywood is no secret to those who bother to look. For over a decade, critics have pointed out the disparities between the genders on and off the big screen. Few have so doggedly followed the issue as media consultant Melissa Silverstein. In her work for the Women’s Media Center and Women and Hollywood websites, she attacks issues concerning women across the film industry. Silverstein recognizes that Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar for Best Director for The Hurt Locker (2008) was historic, but reminds us that in order to win, Bigelow had to work in the paradigm of a man’s film: War movie. Male lead. Explosions (a lot).
The girls at the academy were keenly aware of these facts, too. Each of them rattled off the same “insane” industry statistics when asked why their work was important. When Fariha Rashid, 14, heard the numbers, it was a call to action.
Rashid is quiet and pensive; her thick, wavy black hair falls to the middle of her back and seems to hide her from the world. But she is mature for her age, and when she does speak, that fact becomes obvious. Rashid says the girls banded together to create change for an entire gender.
One of Freyermuth’s filmmaking partners, Courtney Callahan, 14, shares that resolution. The shortest of the bunch — but definitely the most outspoken — Callahan is a firecracker with a penchant for directing. During the photoshoot, she suggested poses and popped her hip with arms akimbo, front and center.
She says it’s still a man’s world in almost every industry. The student films that will take the screens this weekend are a testament to the rallying cry of the festival: women can produce great films, too.
And they did. Each girl made two films during the four-week program. The Real Princesses, Freyermuth and Callahan’s mocumentary about body image and the Disney-princess paradigm, will be screened with Southern Belle. The film is a series of princess testimonials that reveal everything from role model self-awareness to Prince Charming’s kissing abilities.
In Rashid’s home, towering windows cast long, eerie shadows across the floors and walls. Seeing a perfect opportunity to test her new fascination with stop animation, Rashid plans to incorporate the shapes of darkness into her first independent film.
Randi Noyes, 13, towers over her classmates despite being a year younger than them all. Her piercing sage colored eyes reflect her serious side, but her quirky demeanor tells a different story. Every day, she arrived at the academy early and waited for the doors to open. Cicadas buzzed overhead. One morning, while sitting in Stephens Park, the cacophony of their calls gave her the idea for a film: oversized, killer cicadas make up for 14 years of lost time by terrorizing the human population. Of course, a story so “cheesy” — as Noyes describes it — could only be done justice in the style of 1950s sci-fi classics such as The Deadly Mantis and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.
Young Professionals in the Making
Each girl found her niche in one area of production, and for Freyermuth, it was editing. Despite her week of solitary confinement, she says she’s positive it’s what she wants to pursue in filmmaking.
Before attending the academy, she and her friends used to film music videos for Ke$ha songs. Now, as a card-carrying member of Columbia Access Television with professional equipment at her disposal, she hopes to continue filming videos, but for original compositions.
Yost says independent film offers women the freedom to create opportunities, and that’s one reason the academy operated on the indie model. That’s not to say, however, that the medium is easy. When Yost was making her first documentary for submission, she spent nearly all of her free time perfecting the “do-it-yourself method.” She became a one-woman producer, marketer, distributer and lawyer. There was so much to learn that she operated as a sponge for information on a need-to-know basis.
Finding Confidence Through Creativity
The powerful thing she took away from working independently, and what it offers the girls, is the confidence to call themselves filmmakers. She remembers the uncertainty with which she used that label on business cards for the first time. Despite going on to win an award for her submission at the Silverdocs Film Festival, she felt presumptuous using the title.
“Women tend to downplay their skills until they are really sure, and then they can make them public,” Yost says. “It’s important for people to use that title. Sometimes it can be empowering.”
When the time came to unveil the films at the academy this summer, there was a spectrum of emotion flowing among the girls. Like Oscar winners bowing before the crowd, Rashid says seeing the reactions of their first audience was like standing before the Academy after realizing their dreams — a moment of pure accomplishment.
After speaking with these girls, it’s easy to forget how young they are. Although only 13 and 14 years old, their potential and promise precede them. Noyes says she honestly doesn’t know what she’d like to do when she grows up — a jarring response at first, but completely legitimate for an eighth-grader. Callahan has become interested in cast directing but says her plans aren’t concrete. Freyermuth and Rashid both say they want to pursue their favorite parts of production: editing and cinematography, respectively.
Like any shared struggle, producing the short films was an experience that earned the girls a network of colleagues just as passionate as they are. After forming such strong bonds, they plan to keep in touch. The girls developed a collective consciousness of the industry’s gender disparities, and Rashid says they are determined to close the gap — starting with a commitment to the success of one another’s work.
The girls’ kinship is observable and exists on an emotional level, too. The academy not only gave Rashid the confidence to express herself, but most importantly, it let her know she isn’t alone.
After a summer of filmmaking, she says, “You realize you’re not the only one who wants to follow your dream.”
