Higher Learning: Women in View – SEXMONEYMEDIA 2013

Tuesday, June 4 from 2:00pm-3:30pm

TIFF Bell Lightbox, Cinema 3

350 King St. West

FREE

Women are tipping the balance at the box office in both Canada and the US according to recent stats, finally displacing teen boys. So will we see a revolution in content and content creators? Our ever-expanding media landscape should offer the possibility of increased diversity on screen. It makes sense for “product” to reflect the increasingly diversified global audience, yet what’s on offer seems to be more of the same, by the same.

Join us for a lively discussion with a distinguished panel of media leaders. Panelists include Globe and Mail television critic John Doyle; ACTRA National President  Ferne Downey; Head of Sundance Productions Laura Michalchyshyn, and Dr. Stacy Smith, USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism; Head Researcher, Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media. The discussion will be moderated by Rina Fraticelli, Executive Director of Women in View.

This event is a co-presentation between TIFF Higher Learning and Women in View.

SEXMONEYMEDIA will follow a 10:00 AM press conference to launch “Focus on Women 2013,” the first pan-Canadian report to examine the participation of women in Canada’s independent film, television and digital media production sector.

HOW TO OBTAIN TICKETS: Tickets to this event are free. Please contact Christine Webber cwebber@actra.ca to book a ticket for the panel or for more information.

Laura Michalchyshyn

Ms. Michalchyshyn served as President and General Manager of Planet Green at Discovery Communications, Inc, responsible for all aspects of the creative and business strategy for Planet Green, Discovery Communications’ multi-platform businesses including the 24-hour television network. As chief editorial executive, she managed the overall direction of the network, including programming, operations and content development, as well as interfacing with ad sales and affiliate sales to further develop the brand and its appeal to advertisers, operators and viewers.

She served as an Executive Vice President of Programming & Marketing of Sundance Channel and also served as its General Manager. She is a Sales and Marketing Professional at Sundance Enterprises, Inc. Ms. Michalchyshyn was responsible for all creative expressions of the Sundance Channel brand, both on and off-Channel, including original programming, film acquisition, program planning, on-air promotion and the creative strategy and implementation of all off-Channel consumer marketing.

Previously, she served as Senior Vice President of Dramatic Programming for Alliance Atlantis since 1997. She serves as Member of Advisory Board of Tonic, Inc. She was responsible for all programming at Showcase Television, a Canadian dramatic cable channel that broadcasts dramatic series, mini- series, television movies and feature films. She served seven years with Showcase, where she transformed the channel with strategic acquisitions and commissions of some of the best Canadian, American, British, Australian and other international programming from creators, major studios and distributors around the world.

In 2001, Ms. Michalchyshyn led the launch of three Canadian digital specialty channels including Showcase Action, Showcase Diva and IFC Canada. In 1995, Ms. Michalchyshyn was part of the management team that launched the first Canadian women’s cable channel, WTN, where she served as Program Manager and was responsible for scheduling and acquiring movies, series and documentaries. She served three years at WTN, where she produced an ongoing half hour short film series which launched the careers of many emerging Canadian filmmakers.

Ms. Michalchyshyn also produced two independent films with director Noam Gonick which have traveled the international festival circuit and released and broadcast in a number of countries. The documentary Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (1997) and the feature Hey, Happy! (2001) have both been broadcast on Sundance Channel. Ms. Michalchyshyn has received many awards and accolades during her career in programming, including: 2007 Cable World Top 100 Women’s Power list, WIFT’s Excellence in Mentoring and Professional Development, Best Documentary by Hot Docs and Blizzard Awards, E.M.A Awards (“Big Ideas for a Small Planet”), 2006 Multichannel News Woman to Watch, 2006 GLAAD Media Award for outstanding documentary (“TransGeneration”), Best New Canadian Film (Inside Out), 2003 and 2004 Showcase-Best Specialty Cable Channel (Eye and X-tra).

Dr. Smith has written more than 75 journal articles, book chapters, and reports on content patterns and effects of the media.  She has received multiple “top paper” awards for her research from the Instructional Developmental Division of the International Communication Association. Most recently, she has been assessing portrayals of males and females in children’s media. This body of research informs the work of The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, a program started by Academy Award winner Geena Davis. The results from Dr. Smiths research have appeared in a variety of popular media outlets, such as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Huffington Post, Newsweek, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Slate.com, Salon.com, The Boston Globe, and USA Today to name a few.  She also has a co-edited essay in Maria Shriver’s book, A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything (2009).

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Dr. Smith released the groundbreaking report “Exploring the Barriers and Opportunities for Independent Women Filmmakers” with the Sundance Institute and Women in Film Los Angeles. The report in its entirety can be found here.

Dr. Smith will be a panelist at SEXMONEYMEDIA 2013.

John Doyle will be participating as a panelist at Sex Money Media 2013.

Click here to read some of John Doyle’s latest articles.

Ferne Downey will be featured as a panelist at SEXMONEYMEDIA 2013.

NSI Features First is the development launch pad for writer/director/producer teams looking to produce their first or second feature film with strong commercial appeal. The course is led by NSI senior program manager Brandice Vivier.

Karen Powell, partner in Perfect Circle Productions, brings 16+ years of experience to NSI Features First as an executive producer, producer and business affairs executive, working on over 10 treaty co-productions and closing over $145 million in financing. Karen is a member of ACE (ateliers du cinema european) and is a creative leader 2012 through Women In View.

Karen executive produced Short Fat Bald Man, provided production services on Nerds & Monsters and business affairs on recently-released The Colony. Previously she produced Edison & Leo, co-producedThe Timekeeper and Tail Lights Fade, and executive produced NSI Features First project On The Corner.

“I’m excited to join the National Screen Institute’s faculty,” said Karen Powell. “NSI is an extremely worthwhile organization with an excellent reputation for delivering industry training that gets results. It’s also filled with great people and I’m happy to join their ranks.”

“Karen Powell is a powerhouse in the Canadian film world and we are thrilled to welcome her to the NSI Features First team,” said Melissa Kajpust, director of programming at NSI. “We hope with the addition of Karen to our training faculty we can keep successes like the TIFF 2012 premiere of NSI Features First project I Declare War coming.”

NSI Features First 2013 is made possible by Presenting Sponsor Telefilm Canada; Program PartnersThe Brian Linehan Charitable Foundation and Shaw Media; and Strategic Sponsor Corus Entertainment Inc.

All media enquiries

Lauren MacDiarmid, Communications & Programs Coordinator
Tel: 204.957.2999 or email: lauren.macdiarmid@nsi-canada.ca

“I’m interested by the idea that now that we have screens everywhere and are engaging with media all the time, there may be a drive towards genuine experience, something that feels concrete and corporeal.”

Katie: Did you want to just start by telling me a bit about the industry that you work in and how you got there?

Lisa: I’m a filmmaker and I started in documentary. My first short film was Suckerfish. It was a stylized documentary about my relationship with my mother and my Native heritage and it did very well.  My second film was a CTV one-hour documentary Reservation Soldiers. I’ve been filmmaking full-time since then, mainly in documentary but I’ve been also getting into fiction in the last two or three years. I’ve always tended towards mixing different genres.

In 2009 I made Savage, a short residential school musical which won a Genie award. It was a “challenge film” commissioned by imagineNATIVE Film Festival as part of the Embargo Collective. Seven international indigenous filmmakers were assigned restrictions by the other members of the group and we each had to make a film that fulfilled all of the requirements of the restrictions.

Katie: So what would an example of one of these restrictions be?

Lisa: I had to do a musical with heavy metal in it, working with at least one trained actor and one non-actor. It had to be heavily set-decorated. And for all of us there was a theme of “patience” and no English allowed.

After Savage I did the Director’s Lab in 2010 at the Canadian Film Centre and made the short film Parkdale there.

I’ve recently completed two films, How a People Live and Snare. The first is a one-hour documentary about the history of the Gwa’sala-‘Nakwaxda’xw native band on Vancouver Island, including a forced government relocation from their traditional territories in 1964. In fact, this afternoon I’m going to Port Hardy for the community premiere. We’re submitting to festivals but the first place it’s going to screen is obviously in the community.

Snare is a short performance-based piece. It’s another commission by imagineNATIVE, as part of a project called The Stolen Sisters Digital Initiative, in partnership with Amnesty International, and it addresses the issue of violence against aboriginal women.

I’m also writing a fiction feature based on true events at a residential school in Ontario in the late 1940s. Most films that I work on are about aboriginal subjects, but not all of them. Parkdale, the one I did at CFC, is about foster kids in Toronto’s inner city and there are no native characters.

Katie: It sounds like you’ve been able to stay very busy directing.

Lisa: Yeah.

Katie: So what made you decide to apply to the Creative Leaders program?

Lisa: I think this drive towards more theatrical work just sort of got hold of me and I’ve got a long-form idea I’m just developing. If you look at my recent short films, I did a music video Pow.Wow.Wow that was extremely theatrical, Snare is theatrical, and Savage is a musical.

With this program, although a lot of the push is towards how to embrace the digital realm and pushing forward into new areas that way, in my case, I’m pushing myself by asking can I bring theatricality and spectacle into my films? Which is kind of ironic given that I come from a documentary background and a lot of people who haven’t seen my work think of my films as being gritty, hard-luck stories. But anyone who’s seen my films knows that there has always been a lot of playfulness – animation and theatrical elements. So I thought Kim Collier was the perfect person to work with because she’s been a visionary theatre director who’s incorporated so much film into her theatre work. She’s brought film into the theatre and I want to bring theatre into film. And her way of thinking about story structure is really innovative—she’s been able to work collaboratively with people (such as choreographer Crystal Pite) to make a stage experience that’s larger than life.

“As part of the Creative Leaders program I was also able to see the ground-breaking opera Einstein on the Beach by Robert Wilson and Phillip Glass. Talk about non-linear narrative. It’s just a radical re-envisioning of the role of music, sound, mise-en-scene, dance and the use of tonal shifts in subtle ways. Impossible to describe but it was a real eye-opener for me.”

The project that I have in mind would be more theatrical but still a film so I wanted to learn about lighting and costumes and stagecraft. The other thing about the Creative Leaders is that it’s gotten me thinking—especially in the group discussions we’ve had—about where media is going now? And I’m interested by the idea that now that we have screens everywhere and are engaging with media all the time, there may be a drive towards genuine experience, something that feels concrete and corporeal.

Why do people love Cirque du Soleil so much? Because it’s physical and real. And there’s the spectacle too, which is Cirque, which is Game of Thrones. The idea of bringing a spectacle, where the design and the visual aspect of it is larger than life in this theatrical kind of world. And rather than thinking about how to make something that plays on a tiny screen where people can be doing something else at the same time, to kind of go the other direction, I’m thinking about how to create an encompassing experience.

Katie: How do you make people stop?

Lisa: Yeah, and I think even though it’s hard to get people to do it, they crave it. That’s where my idea for Creative Leaders came from and I think I’m a bit unusual in that a lot of people are looking at business models and distribution whereas I’m working creatively on something that might seemingly appear to go backwards in time.

Katie:  But it’s a new model of an art form.

Lisa: Yeah.

Katie: How has your relationship with Kim been developing?

Lisa: It’s good. I got to sit in on part of the script development process for a collaboration she’s doing with Chris Haddock (Boardwalk Empire, Da Vinci’s Inquest, Intelligence) and visual artist Stan Douglas. They’re collaborating on a piece that is sort of filmed theatre with complex CG backgrounds, very non-traditional. And when she put on Tear the Curtain in Toronto, I sat in on the prep week, to watch the mechanics of how putting on a show works.

As part of the Creative Leaders program I was also able to see the ground-breaking opera Einstein on the Beach by Robert Wilson and Phillip Glass. Talk about non-linear narrative. It’s just a radical re-envisioning of the role of music, sound, mise-en-scene, dance and the use of tonal shifts in subtle ways. Impossible to describe but it was a real eye-opener for me.

Kim and I have had conversations about what is non-linear narrative and what I want to do moving forward is host an informal gathering of people that she and that I know from different areas of the arts to talk about this idea of alternative structures for stories.

“It’s interesting, I know a lot of Native women directors and I don’t know as many non-Native women who direct. I find in the Native film community, women directors are way more represented as a proportion of the directing pool.”

Katie: Can you tell me about a woman in your industry that you think is doing really interesting work?

Lisa: I’m a big fan of Jennifer Baichwal’s intelligent and visually-striking films. She makes “idea” films—which often we think of as just talking heads—but she brings a real cinematic eye to it.  And she takes on big subjects in such a sure-handed and creative way.

Someone who is doing some interesting work right now is Danis Goulet who is a Native filmmaker in Toronto. She’s had two shorts that have gone to TIFF in the last two or three years. And what I find interesting about her films is that she’s working with non-actors telling very authentic  stories from native communities.  Her style of storytelling is very upfront – it feels almost like documentary but there’s a lot of craft and subtlety.

It’s hard to think of women directors and you’re reminding me that there really aren’t that many. It’s interesting, I know a lot of Native women directors and I don’t know as many non-Native women who direct. I find in the Native film community, women directors are way more represented as a proportion of the directing pool.

The conversation about women in Hollywood gained some momentum with the report released at Sundance 2013 about the lack of female representation in the filmmaking world. The industry was celebrated for progress when women directors made up 50% of the drama category at Sundance 2013 and reprimanded for sexism when Bigelow was snubbed by the Academy in the Best Director category. The latest Celluloid Ceiling Report found that “women comprised 18% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films of 2012.”

Then came the Oscars. Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane was brought in to host the 2013 Oscars in order to appeal to a younger, male audience. Unfortunately, MacFarlane’s performance as Oscar host perpetuated the pervasive sexism and racism of the Oscars rather than critiquing an Academy that is 77% male and 94% white. Some of his most offensive jokes included bits on domestic abuse (relating Django Unchained to Chris Brown’s relationship with Rhianna), eating disorders (suggesting actresses faked the flu to fit into their dresses), race (who can tell Eddie Murphy from Denzel Washington?) and an incredibly sexist video in which he sang a song about all of the famous Hollywood actresses who have “shown their boobs” on screen. This video was especially hard-hitting considering how few women were being acknowledged as artists at the ceremony. With a whopping 0.5 female writers and zero female directors nominated and an over all male to female nomination ratio of 140:35 in all categories, the “We Saw Your Boobs” song suggests that in one of the only categories where female artists could have been considered to be taken seriously, they were actually just being objectified.

Here are some (of many) critiques of Seth MacFarlane’s performance as Oscar host:

The Atlantic: “The Banality of Seth MacFarlane’s Sexism and Racism at the Oscars.”

Gawker: “Here are all of Seth MacFarlane’s Predictable Sexist, Homophobic and Racist Oscar Jokes.”

Now Toronto: “Oscars, 2013: So that happened.”

Other articles more deeply assessed the impact of MacFarlane’s jokes in a ceremony that continues to marginalize artists due to gender, race and sexuality.

Think Progress: “Why Seth MacFarlane bombed the Oscars – And What It Says About Hollywood.”

The impact of winning an Oscar is not insignificant and the Huffington Post recently posted a video discussion with Melissa Silverstein about the lack of female artists honoured at the Oscars. When reflecting on last night’s show, this is a worthy conversation to keep in mind.

HuffPost Live: “And The Loser Is… Women.“