Remember the first time you watched a film and felt the world shift beneath your feet? You instinctively knew that you would be a different person walking out of the theatre, that the way you experience the world, however briefly, would have changed.
That’s how I felt seeing Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the 2019 film directed by Céline Sciamma. I felt like I was watching cinema as it was meant to be; slow and beautiful, gritty and ethereal, fast and haunting. It was romantic, heart-shattering, wonderful, and breathtaking; it was everything I want in a film and then some. It was, dare I say it, my favourite movie of 2019. More than the beloved Parasite directed by Bong Joon-Ho, which had previously been at the top of my list, and which I thought was incontestable.
To me, the film perfectly embodied this quote by author Sir Kazuro Ishiguro from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech—“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?” I strive towards finding films like that, ones that are pockets of experience. What felt so good about Portrait was that, with an almost complete absence of men on screen, there was space for female emotions to flourish. In that way, it created a perfect space for a female viewer—especially a queer female viewer—to be swept up by the story.
And in that same vein, one of my other top films of 2019, The Farewell, directed by Lulu Wang, had a female-centric story. It’s a family drama about a Chinese-American woman and her relationship with her grandmother, whereas Portrait is a French historical drama about creation, featuring a sexual and romantic love between two women. They are both unwavering in their artistry and razor-sharp in their writing. Both have captivating cinematography, from colour grading to lighting, and carefully crafted scores. They are both tour-de-forces. Their key similarities? Neither film was nominated for any section of the Academy Awards, and both centre around women and their experiences with other women.
Unlike these more niche (if you can call them that) awards, in the 92-year history of the Oscars, only five women have ever been nominated for Best Director; Lina Wertmüller in 1976 for Seven Beauties, Jane Campion in 1993 for The Piano, Sofia Coppola in 2003 for Lost in Translation, Kathryn Bigelow in 2009 for The Hurt Locker, and Greta Gerwig in 2017 for Lady Bird. And of these women, only Bigelow left with a gold man in hand. The reasoning for this? As one TIME Magazine article points out, the Academy voters, especially the Directors branch, are skewed heavily against women and other minorities. It is an eye-opening and somewhat disheartening read.
Is it any wonder that women are angry? When we are only in recent years being taken seriously for our art and our films, being let into the previously exclusive gentlemen’s club, and still, we are told to keep quiet and watch the masters work. We aren’t considered masters in our own right, however earth-shattering the films we create, even when we make art that moves hearts and minds, that speak to our experience of toil and blood, sound and silence.
I applaud directors like Sciamma, Wang, Gerwig, and other current names like Melina Matsoukas (Queen & Slim), Olivia Wilde (Booksmart), and Lorene Scafaria (Hustlers). I also applaud the LGBTQ+ and POC female creators; it is essential to honour the struggles of our intersectional sisters and non-binary fellows.
Is it any wonder that women are angry?
More female and minority-led stories are not about erasing men, or straight people, or white people, or cis people, or any combination of those, from the artistic scene, but an even distribution of content, and a more egalitarian work environment. We need more unique voices so we can create more unique films, isn’t that what we should strive for as an artistic community? To create new experiences for people who value film as a medium, and to tell our stories. To say to people, like Sciamma has done, like Wang, this is what it feels like to me, does it feel this way to you?
People sometimes wonder why minorities get so worked up over these sorts of arguments, but when you realize the disparity of our creators–that no black women have been nominated for best director, that very few trans people have been nominated for anything at all–you might reconsider. The Academy Awards are not the pinnacle of filmmaking. They don’t define merit. But they speak for a larger societal problem, and I refuse to ignore them. Stories by women and about women deserve to be recognized by society, deserve to be taken seriously by larger establishments and systems we have in place.
As a bisexual woman, if I become a successful filmmaker, you can pry my Oscar from my cold dead hands. I will have worked harder for it than a lot of men.
Feature image a screenshot.
