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The news regarding women directors of fictional films in Hollywood continues to be bleak: in 2007, only 6 percent of these films were directed by women. But the non-fiction film world is a whole different story. While no one has exact figures, anecdotally most experts in the documentary community believe that women directors make up at least 50 percent of the directing ranks. Take a look at all the major film festivals that include documentaries and you will see women's names as prominent as the men’s.
So how come women documentarians have achieved a success that has eluded those in the fiction business? It could be because “a lot of the funders in the broadcast world are also women," says Sean Farnel, the programming director at Hot Docs, one of the big documentary festivals in Canada. It's true. Everywhere you look there are women—from Sheila Nevins and her team that run HBO's documentary division; to the three-year-old women-run producing/funding entity Chicken and Egg Pictures, which, in a variety of ways, has supported 37 women-directed films (including Lioness and Going on 13, which both premiered recently at the Tribeca Film Festival); to Women Make Movies, which has been distributing, promoting and producing films by and about women since 1972.
Another reason is not so upbeat: documentaries have lower budgets, smaller staffs and, in turn, less prestige. Cara Mertes, director of the documentary film program at the Sundance Institute, says that the doc field "is notoriously not a good way to make a living and men tend to be interested in things where there is a lot of potential for a pay-off so they will gravitate towards fictional films."
Women have been an integral part of formation of the documentary genre, with veterans like Barbara Kopple, Kim Longinotto, Chris Hegedus and Lourdes Portillo leading the way. In the 1970s, women picked up cameras to document the feminist tumult happening around them. They have traversed the abortion rights struggle since Roe with films like Dorothy Fadiman's definitive series (including The Fragile Promise of Choice and From Danger to Dignity); Jane: An Abortion Service by Kate Kurtz and Nell Lundy; and On Hostile Ground by Liz Mermin and Jenny Raskin.
Now, when abortion doesn’t get as much media attention, women filmmakers keep focus on the issue with evolving views. Gillian Aldrich and Jennifer Baumgardner used women's voices and experiences to make I Had an Abortion. Faith Pennick felt compelled to make Silent Choices, about African American women and abortion, after a friend said that "abortion is a white women's issue and black women have more important things to worry about." Pennick knew full well that "if Roe v Wade were overturned tomorrow it's going to be black and brown women who will be affected first and hardest." Angie Young took her camera to South Dakota while working against that state's attempt to ban abortion. As only someone who grew up post-Roe can do, she is making The Coat Hanger Project to speak to her peers who know little if anything about abortion rights.
Documentaries have always been a crucial way to get information out about media neglected issues and lives, especially from the world’s poorer countries. This function has been helped along in recent years by the rise of the internet and improved technologies like smaller digital cameras and computer home editing programs.
Several films telling women’s stories with international focus have been able to garner attention precisely because of little competing coverage from mainstream media. Women have been using docs to engage the media at least since the early 1990s, when Alice Walker went on the Today show and spoke about female genital mutilation in conjunction with the documentary Warrior Marks. When Lourdes Portillo's film Senorita Extraviada was released in 2002, it prodded the media to cover the missing and murdered young women in Juarez, Mexico.
The list of films women make to awaken the world is too plentiful to name them all here. There is the Oscar-winning Born into Brothels (co-directed by Zana Briski) about the children of prostitutes in Calcutta and God Sleeps in Rwanda (directed by Kimberlee Acquaro and Stacy Sherman) about five women rebuilding their lives after the Rwandan genocide; more recent are The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (directed by Lisa F. Jackson), Pray the
