Lack of funding and ignorance of the institutions that control it keep women at an inherent disadvantage in the film industry, Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat said in his speech on the future of women’s cinema at the Tokyo International Film Festival.
Sedat, who is in the Venice competition jury this year, touched on the low rate of women’s films selected for the competition and said, “Discrimination did not start at the festival, it started at the development level.”
The talk, which was part of the festival’s Tokyo Talk sessions at the TIFF Lounge in Tokyo Midtown Hibiya, also featured Serbian director Jelena Maksimović, whose film “Until the Day Ends” is playing in Venice’s Orizzonti section. Sedat, who currently lives in Germany, opened the 76th Berlinale before the screening of his latest film “No Good Men” in Tokyo. Film scholar and presenter Takasaki Ikuko moderated.
This session followed other reflections on women’s film careers, both in the Women’s Empowerment section of the festival and in an animation symposium held earlier the same day on the past, present and future of four women working as directors in the anime industry.
The panel set out to discuss how women and feminism are presented in the films of Sedat and Maksimović and beyond, but focused more on the practical and financial obstacles that stand in the way of more women-directed films.
Both filmmakers said that having the tools to make a movie often requires a certain amount of adaptability.
“The situation was the same in Yugoslavia,” said Maksimović. “Although it was a very progressive country, there were many more male directors. […] but after the Yugoslav Wars, things began to change in the Balkans… not because of that, but because we moved to more progressive times.”
There are also external factors such as where the money for film funds comes from. Maksimović said that the Serbian Film Center “worked properly” for several years until the outgoing government completely cut off its funding in retaliation for filmmakers’ frequent support of students’ anti-corruption protests.
The student-led movement, which emerged from protests over the fatal collapse of the dome of a train station in Novi Sad in 2024, won early parliamentary elections in Serbia on October 25. Aleksandar Vučić resigned from the presidency in September.
“Fortunately, the students won a few days ago. We are very happy now, but we have a big struggle ahead of us,” said Maksimović, adding that it would take time to repair the damage done by the previous regime.
“Even when the film center was working normally, we had difficulty financing our films, the amount of money allocated for Serbian films is very small and it is difficult to find co-production countries,” he said. He added that these are not definitive reasons for the scarcity of Serbian films shown in Japan, but that male filmmakers in the country have a privilege that women do not have.
Maksimović later returned to the topic, saying that there was a certain solidarity between filmmakers making less mainstream films, but that it was also a “certain kind of bubble”, separate from what he called the “big fund”.
“We didn’t dare approach big funds to get more money for our films because we knew we wouldn’t find the money there,” he said. He hopes the victory of the student movement will give a chance to overhaul the system. “I’m very proud to come from Serbia today because the students really showed us that this is possible,” he said.
Sadat also spoke about the forces limiting film production in Afghanistan.
“There’s the cultural mafia, there’s a bunch of old men, and you, as a woman, can never get in,” she said. He added that having even a small chance to enjoy the same privileges requires surrender, submission, and compromise.
“What about entering this network? [or] It connects to another system like the cinema community or me. In my case, it was European filmmaking,” said Sedat.
Sadat said this system still has inequalities. He added of European funding: “Making films in Afghanistan is a crime – it’s not that extreme – but the discrimination is fundamental, it’s in the system.”
She said the gender gap in funding was “taken for granted” and that the reason there were so few films by women in competition in Venice this year was due to a lack of appropriate development support and equal treatment. Only one of the 20 films in the Venice competition, May el-Toukhy’s “Unknown Woman,” was directed by a woman.
Towards the end of the talk, an audience member noted that the Tokyo International Film Festival had “only four films in the selection made by women” and asked how to achieve material change rather than false commitment. Sadat responded by returning to Venice.
“This year I was in the main competition of the Venice Film Festival and I was very surprised. I don’t want to comment on a specific film, but there were very bad films, but they were made by male directors. But female directors are not allowed to make bad films.” [films]”When the press asked why there were no women’s films, the director of Venice said, ‘The quality of films made by female directors is not good enough to compete.'”
Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera said: Diversity In July, we said that the competition’s film directed by a woman was “the only film we found to be of sufficient quality to enter the international competition.” “The Unknown Woman” won Venice’s highest award, the Golden Lion.
Sadat suggested that men were not subjected to the same scrutiny. Putting aside any sexist backlash, she added that filmmakers are human and there should be room for experimentation, and that women are held to a higher standard where anything less than perfection is punished.
“We must change the systems; we must start from the funds and committees,” Maksimović said. He added that he did not want his films to be evaluated in a vanity manner.
“I know people are trying to change things, but are they really changing? Or are they just putting things in boxes?” he said.
Responding to a question about the future, Sedat said: “Coming from a country of war, people in our country are literally in survival mode. We do not think about the future, we think about the present. Change can start from small things. I do not think we should wait for bigger changes, they will happen gradually, over a very long period of time.”