No abstract

German cinema has in recent years experienced a revival of scrutiny for its evident gender inequality. Women directors receive less public funds, work with lower budgets, and their films have smaller releases; however, their films are often more successful artistically and are produced financially more efficiently. The lack of female talent in the industry, thus, can't be a problem of quality as is often argued. Instead, industry structures fail to sustain female directors' careers. This article presents findings from a series of extensive empirical studies on the German film industry. One of the key findings is that the producer is crucial to the gender balance of the team, evidenced by the fact that female producers work significantly more often with female authors and directors.

The global film industry is shaped by gender inequality. Women are structurally underrepresented in professional roles that include high levels of creative and economic decision-making power, such as directors, writers, and producers. In our study, we ask to what extent the film festival sector, a prestigious sub-field of the film industry, is structured by gender biases. To address this question, we conceptualize the festival sector as a one-mode network consisting of film festivals that are connected through screening the same film, and as a two-mode network consisting of films and festivals. The composition of film core creative teams (incl. directors, writers, and producers) varies by gender. While some films are made by mixed gender core creative teams, others are made by women-only or men-only core creative teams. We use data on 1323 films that circulate among 1523 festivals and apply network analysis to describe and disentangle the structural facets that underlie persistent gender inequality in the film festival sector. In the first step, we analyze to what extent the one-mode film festival network is connected through the circulation of films with varying gender compositions, and what festivals occupy broker positions in this network. In the second step, we analyze to what extent films of different gender compositions are equally distributed across the overall festival landscape. For the first step, we find that the festival network connected through films by women-only core creative teams is much sparser in comparison to the network connected through films by men-only core creative teams. We also find that the majority of festivals obtaining important broker positions in the network, has not signed the 5050 × 2020 Gender Parity Pledge, which has important policy implications. For the second step, we find that films by men-only core creative teams are on average screened at more festivals as compared to films by women-only core creative teams, and that the degree of distribution of films by men-only core creative teams is much more skewed indicating a more pronounced festival hit dynamic.

On a sunny August afternoon in Amsterdam, Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist of the Film Festival Research Network met cultural analyst, festival programmer, and filmmaker Eliza Steinbock (currently working as a lecturer and researcher at Maastricht University). The discussion ranged from Amsterdam-based transgender film festivals to issues of precarity in activist film festivals and the politics of representation in trans* 1 cinema culture.Loist & de Valck: How did you get involved with the Netherlands Transgender Film Festival (NTGF)?Steinbock: I moved to the Netherlands in December 2002 for my study abroad program, which was the Gender and Sexuality program at the School for International Training. My partner at the time knew Kam Wai Kui, the director of the Netherlands Transgender Film Festival, via another festival in Vancouver. I contacted him to say I'd like to work on trans* representation and particularly around sexuality. He wrote back and stated 'fantastic, but I don't know much about that because there is so little, however, I do know a lot about documentaries and talk shows that have been made in the Netherlands'. We became friends and I volunteered at the next edition of the festival. I worked at the information booth. Kam Wai also programmed a film essay that I made called Pull-in that was about trans* relationships and immigration.Because it is a biannual festival, the next event was not until 2005. During that time I was in England for graduate studies, writing about representations of intimacy and on trans sexuality in feature films. I started to volunteer earlier, and not just during the festival. I was the volunteer coordinator and I roped in a lot of my friends to work at the festival. That year I think we had the best attendance, something like 2,500 people. At that point I knew I wanted to pursue doctoral studies and I was already starting to develop my ideas about what that project EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES www.necsus-ejms.org

This article traces the history of queer film festivals, from their beginnings to the present day, while offering socio-political and cultural reasons for a range of trends in festival name, location, and programming choices, before outlining the relatively late emergence of Film Festival Studies, including queer festival studies, within Film Studies and Queer Studies in the academy. It then uses the Scottish Queer International Film Festival (SQIFF) as a case study to demonstrate the increasing focus on diversity and inclusivity in queer film festivals, especially more grass roots ones, and the social impact of this.