Birds of a feather screen together

Cath Clarke previews the cheekily named Birds Eye View festival.

Mar  1 2007

Leaving the cinema after last year’s Sundance screening of ‘Stephanie Daley’, an American man was heard muttering about why anyone would want to see a film about a teenage girl who killed her baby. It was a dumb thing to say about a film that is the opposite of dumb. ‘Stephanie Daley’ is a complex thriller, played in the lowest key, about a pregnant doctor (Tilda Swinton) and a teenager (Amber Tamblyn) whom she is called in to assess. The girl has concealed her pregnancy and stands accused of killing the baby to whom she gave birth on a school skiing trip. It’s a gripping and complex film; we learn that Swinton’s character has recently endured a stillbirth, and the girl seems to be completely passive to her own situation – did she even know she was pregnant?

That same dumb guy came to mind when flicking through the line-up of this year’s Birds Eye View Film Festival, which will be showing ‘Stephanie Daley’. The festival dedicated to films directed by women is now in its third year and has clearly hit its stride, with a selection of smart, intelligent features straight off the festival circuit as well as a good bunch of shorts and documentaries. Of the main features, ‘Away from Her’, directed by the actor Sarah Polley, is set in Canada, with Julie Christie as a happily married woman with Alzheimer’s. Perhaps the starriest entry is ‘SherryBaby’, written and directed by Laurie Collyer. Maggie Gyllenhaal (‘Secretary’) was recently nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance as a recovering junkie, out of prison and in a hurry to repair her relationship with her young daughter and middle-class family.

The fact that there are so few women directors working in cinema crops up from time to time. We hear the statistics: women make up seven per cent of directors, and 12 per cent of screenwriters. (According to UK Film Council stats, audience figures are roughly 50/50 by sex.) It’s a story that often surfaces during the hullabaloo of Oscar season, most obviously when Sofia Coppola was nominated for best director for ‘Lost in Translation’. She was only the third woman to have been nominated (after Jane Campion for ‘The Piano’ and Lina Wertmüller for ‘Seven Beauties’ in 1977).

Should we care? We certainly see films directed by men that depict women truthfully. (Pawel Pawlikowski and Ken Loach spring to mind.) The strength of the films showing at Birds Eye View is perhaps evidence that we should. ‘I think it’s striking that the films we are showing have these interesting, complex female characters,’ says Birds Eye View’s director Rachel Millward. She is passionate that more women should be behind the camera. Millward was a budding film-maker when she set up her cheekily named festival with Pinny Grylls in 2002, depressed at the lack of women role models. (Talk to anyone about this subject, and Campion comes up, a lot.) ‘If 93 per cent of the stories we see are male, then that’s just an imbalance,’ says Millward. ‘If you ask people to come up with ten directors, chances are they won’t name a woman.’

There is, of course, a new generation of women directors. Take Sofia Coppola and Samira Makhmalbaf, who, interestingly, were both raised within film-making dynasties. This may inspire cries of nepotism from some, but it perhaps helps to shed light on the reasons why other women in cinema don’t have the confidence to become directors and are more likely to work in other areas of production. The hallowed domain of the auteur remains strictly men only. Is there a woman working today we’d give the title to? Here in the UK, you might think of Lynne Ramsay, but she’s hardly had an easy ride. Five years on from ‘Morvern Callar’, she is working on an adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s ‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’ after being elbowed off an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s ‘The Lovely Bones’ in favour of Peter Jackson.

But the determined, talented directors whose films are screening at Birds Eye View are, on the whole, positive. ‘I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it for years,’ says Hilary Brougher, director of ‘Stephanie Daley’. ‘Certainly being a woman film-maker is becoming more accepted. But films about women’s experience continue to be marginalised. Hollywood still lives by the adage that you can get a woman in to see man’s film but not a man to see a woman’s film.’

It took Laurie Collyer five years to raise the backing for ‘SherryBaby’. ‘It’s interesting how difficult it was to raise the money and yet how broad the story and how accessible to the mainstream middle-class audience it is.’ Finance eventually came after Maggie Gyllenhaal saw the script and jumped at the role. ‘You definitely get stigmatised that you have made some kind of chick-flick,’ agrees Sarah Polley, whose ‘Away From Her’ is actually told from a man’s point of view. Even successful directors can be boxed into a corner. Mira Nair (‘Monsoon Wedding’, ‘Vanity Fair’) once explained to an interviewer how she tried to take on a political thriller: ‘I went out to LA to lobby for it and I got the vibe that they were humouring me.’

And yet women flex their dexterity as well as the next director. Mary Harron went from the ultra-violence of ‘American Pyscho’ to biopic with ‘The Notorious Bettie Page’. Catherine Hardwicke followed the very personal ‘Thirteen’ with the skate movie ‘Lords of Dogtown’ and then ‘The Nativity Story’. Women film-makers don’t exist solely to direct ‘Bridget Jones’ adaptations. ‘It matters to me what stories get told on screen,’ says Millward. ‘Film is a very powerful medium. Images influence the way we operate, the way we see ourselves.’

Birds Eye View runs March 8 to 14 at the ICA and other venues. For more information, head to the official site here: www.birds-eye-view.co.uk.

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