The Sitges Festival will not deliver the winners of this edition for a few days but it already has a winner to present to moviegoers and the sector. Estíbaliz Burgaleta has been awarded the ‘Girls just wanna have a fan’ scholarship, designed by the organization to stimulate the creation of gender productions with a woman’s stamp based on aid for the development of fantastic films. Burgaleta will make a short-teaser of his feature film project ‘El Chino’, the story of a zombie invasion in a supermarket that draws from classics such as the blockbuster Korean film ‘Train to Busan’ but also from the national hit ‘Rec 3’, by Paco Plaza. A screenwriter since 2012, this Madrilenian has experience from her participation in successful series such as ‘Velvet’ and the recently released Netflix show ‘You are not special’, she has a couple of short films that she has written and directed, but based on the initiative of the Sitges Festival, it can make the leap to the king of cinema format, a step that many talented women still struggle to take.
Mónica García Massagué, promoter of the festival’s WomaninFan project and general director of the Sitges Festival Foundation, is determined to promote opportunities so that many of the women who embark on the cinematographic path of the fantasy genre can give continuity to their first projects, some such as the nine finalists who will be able to participate in the industry activities scheduled at the Festival to strengthen relationships in the sector and facilitate work contacts and networking.
García Massagué also presents these days a book that compiles articles on the participation of women filmmakers in the genre that aims to give a vision from different angles of the phenomenon, for a long time invisible or directly non-existent or mistreated. the director of the festivalAngel Hallthe film teacher and critic Violeta Kovacsics or the producer and programmer of film festivals Heidi Honeycutt are some of the voices that contribute their vision of the female gaze in filmography to give different keys to the state of the matter.
the invisible
Through the book parade from historical women of the cinema erased as Thea Von HarborFritz Lang’s wife but above all the screenwriter of the mythical ‘Metropolis’, the pioneering American director Alice Guy- Blache and others who hacked their way into a male-dominated sector like Stephanie Rothmann, the first woman to obtain a Director’s Guild of America scholarship and who multiplied her work in B productions of the 1960s and 1970s, breaking with the tradition of being a woman from or a family from to carve out her professional career.
Are there women’s movies?
We also learn about the evolution of female creators in Spanish fantastic cinema at the hands of Diego López-Fernández, programmer at the Festival, a more thorny path than the American one due to the weight of Francoism and his education, just as European cinema has been a hotbed of culture for female voices in the genre, although with the handicap of being boxed in as auteur filmmakers, far from the big box offices that only stars like Kathryn Bigelow touched with a cinema far removed from themes related to women’s gaze. “There is no women’s cinema & rdquor ;, says Kovacsics, who claims the value of the contributions of filmmakers to normalize the role of women in gender, beyond their gender perspective.
Industry quotas
The debate on quotas is also addressed in an interview with Annick Mahnert, film producer and programmer and director of the Frontières industry forum, one of the most influential, which claims the ability of women to “open the door to another universe of references, of fears and concerns that we know from our own sensitivity & rdquor ;, he explains. Subsidies and aid are necessary, he reasons, but quotas… ”it is the quality of the productions that see the light that will help to consolidate the position of women in the sector”, ditch.
Claire Denis, Ana Lily Amirpour, Jessica Hausner, Céline Sciamma, Jennifer Kent, Julia Ducournau, but also Patty Jenkins (‘Wonderwoman’) and Karyn Kusama (‘Jennyfer’s body’) or Mary Lambert (‘Living Cemetery’) travel through the book with their different approaches to the genre.
“The future? Well, being able to answer the following question almost without thinking: quotes a director whose surname is used to discover her own stylejust as we do when talking about a film with Lynchian or Hitchcockian overtones & rdquor ;, Mónica García ditches.