Marian Evans recently sent us a breakdown of the Fresh Shorts investment details, which will be eye-opening for women in all areas of filmmaking.
Marian wrote:
Sixteen films were greenlit, eight with $30,000 budgets and eight with $10,000. There were 229 applications, and Juliette Veber has said I can analyse the gender of writers and directors attached to applications if I go into the NZFC in January.
$30,000 budget
Five with male writers and directors $150,000
Two with female writers and directors $60,000
One with a mixed gender $30,000
$10,000 budget
Seven with male writers and directors $70,000
One with a female writer and director $10,000
Total investment in projects with male writers and directors: $220,000 (69%)
With female writers and directors $70,000 (22%)
With mixed gender writer and director $30,000 (9%)
When combined with the most recent Premiere Shorts short-list (no projects yet greenlit that I can find), where women wrote only 13% of the short-listed projects, this seems to indicate that the short film 'pathway' to feature filmmaking in NZ is not working for women. In addition, on the NZFC website, the stills from short films are overwhelmingly images of men and boys, which I only just noticed:
http://www.nzfilm.co.nz/FilmCatalogue/ShortFilms/LatestShortFilms.aspx.
We've uploaded her full commentary on the Fresh Short Stats in our Resource section if you'd like to take a look. While you're there, we recommend you also check out another of Marian's articles (a small portion of content is repeated in the Fresh Shorts article) on Gender Issues in Film.
Marian Evans completed her PhD, Development: Opening space for New Zealand women's participation in scriptwriting for feature films? in 2009. Having found that New Zealand women writers' and directors' participation in feature filmmaking is very low, Marian is using her thesis screenplay - Development - to test an alternative feature film production pathway. She hopes that this project, when completed, will provide a useful model for other women storytellers.