female directors

Things are shaky and spooky in Vanessa Renwick’s short films. Watching her films, I’m never really sure where I am or why I’m there or what will happen, but I’m compelled to go along for the ride. Renwick, now 51, shot many of her tiny films on hand-held film cameras in late eighties and early nineties, drawing on her own wildly varied life experiences for subject matter.

Check out our interview below the jump. 

In the 85-year-long history of the Academy Awards, only four women have been nominated for Best Director. That's absurd. 

This year, the 77 percent male, 94 percent white Academy made it clear that they weren’t ready to recognize a woman twice for outstanding directorial work when they snubbed Kathryn Bigelow for her work on Zero Dark Thirty. Bigelow became the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar in 2009 for The Hurt Locker. Her new film, based on true events leading up to the killing of Osama Bin Laden, snagged nods for Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Screenwriter, but Oscar left no love for Bigelow herself. 

Let's get this straight: While Hollywood is still male-dominated, lots of women made excellent films this year. In stark contrast to the Oscars, women filmmakers had huge success at last month's Sundance Film Festival. The lopsidedness of this year’s Oscar nominees underscores the challenges faced by women working in the world of blockbuster films. 

The problem here is not the quality of films made by women. The problem is Oscar economics.

For some reason, there is an outdated notion that women don’t like horror movies. The truth is, women don’t just like horror—they’ve been making it for decades, and the genre would not be itself today it if it weren’t for the perseverance of women in the industry. Here are three women that made it possible...

The commonality of really problematic depictions in Hollywood and other aspects of pop culture is, to my eye, a pretty compelling argument for improving representation on the creative teams behind the media we consume. However, it's clear that better representations aren't necessarily something that people are interested in. Indeed, Silverstein notes that in the world of television, shows created by women about women are among the least likely to get picked up, which suggests that the networks don't care about accurate depictions.