film | Multicultural Meanderings

Cinq ans après «SLĀV», les minorités visibles se taillent une place

2023/06/27 Leave a comment

Of interest, increased diversity in Quebec cultural sector:

Depuis la controverse entourant la création des spectacles SLĀV et Kanata, il y a cinq ans, les artistes issus de minorités visibles foulent plus que jamais les planches des théâtres québécois. Au cinéma toutefois, leur présence évolue en dent de scie, montrent des données inédites compilées par Le Devoir.

« On sent que les théâtres se sont emparés de cet enjeu plus radicalement. Malheureusement, ça bouge moins vite au cinéma, où seuls quelques projets tirent la moyenne vers le haut », constate la présidente de l’Union des artistes, Tania Kontoyanni, à la vue de nos chiffres. Selon elle, on peut tout de même parler « d’un avant et d’un après » SLĀV et Kanata dans le milieu culturel.

Il y a cinq ans, ces deux pièces du metteur en scène Robert Lepage ont engendré un débat enflammé sur l’appropriation culturelle et la place des minorités visibles dans les productions culturelles d’ici. La première, SLĀV, s’inspirait de chants d’esclaves afro-américains, mais ne comptait que deux comédiennes noires sur six. La seconde, Kanata, se voulait une relecture de « l’histoire du Canada à travers le prisme des rapports entre Blancs et Autochtones », mais ne comptait pas un seul comédien autochtone.

En 2020, Le Devoir avait mesuré l’impact de la polémique et constaté que la proportion d’acteurs, de réalisateurs, de metteurs en scène et d’auteurs de minorités visibles au cinéma et au théâtre avait quasi doublé entre 2017 et 2019. Mais qu’en est-il aujourd’hui ? Est-ce que les efforts dans ces milieux se poursuivent ?

Notre équipe a répété l’exercice pour l’année 2022, en utilisant la même méthodologie, soit d’éplucher la programmation de sept théâtres et les génériques des 10 films les plus populaires en salle durant l’année. Malgré les limites de ce genre d’exercice, les chiffres compilés sont tout de même révélateurs.

En théâtre, 21 % des metteurs en scène, auteurs et interprètes des compagnies recensées étaient issus de minorités visibles pour la saison 2022-2023. Cette proportion était de 14 % en 2018-2019 et de 9 % en 2017-2018.

En cinéma, selon l’analyse des 10 films les plus vus en 2022, 11,5 % des scénaristes, réalisateurs et acteurs étaient issus de minorités visibles. Une proportion qui a plus que doublé en comparaison avec la période avant SLĀV et Kanata, où l’on ne comptait que 4 % d’artistes de minorités visibles. Mais c’est bien moins que 2019, où l’on se retrouvait avec une proportion de 18,7 %.

Fait à noter : le gouvernement canadien définit comme « minorité visible » toutes « personnes, autres que les Autochtones, qui ne sont pas de race blanche ou qui n’ont pas la peau blanche ». Pour notre exercice, nous avons inclus les Autochtones dans cette définition.

Selon le recensement de 2021 de Statistique Canada, 16,1 % de la population du Québec s’identifie à une des minorités visibles, et il y a 2,5 % d’Autochtones dans la province.

On sent que les théâtres se sont emparés de cet enjeu plus radicalement. Malheureusement, ça bouge moins vite au cinéma.

— Tania Kontoyanni

Le théâtre dans la bonne voie

« On est vraiment rendus ailleurs, je trouve ça très encourageant », commente Charles Bender, comédien d’origine autochtone.

Selon lui, depuis le congrès du Conseil québécois du théâtre (CQT) en 2015, il existait déjà un mouvement pour plus de diversité au théâtre. L’affaire SLĀV et Kanata a permis de faire connaître ces enjeux à l’ensemble de la population et d’accélérer le changement.

« Les membres de la communauté sont plus sensibles aux réalités de tout le monde, on se pose des questions à chaque étape de création sur nos façons de faire. On va dans la bonne direction », renchérit la coprésidente du CQT, Rachel Morse. Mais beaucoup reste à faire, selon elle, pour rendre le milieu encore plus inclusif.

Elle pointe du doigt le déséquilibre d’une institution théâtrale à l’autre. « Certains ont besoin de temps. On a lancé une trousse d’outils sur l’appropriation culturelle [la semaine dernière], c’est quelque chose qui pourra les aider à mettre en marche ce changement », espère-t-elle.

Si la proportion de minorités visibles parmi les auteurs ou les metteurs en scène aug, ente sans cesse depuis 2017 en théâtre, cela va bien plus lentement que du côté des interprètes. Or, de l’avis de Charles Bender, il faut néanmoins continuer de porter le regard au-delà de la distribution sur scène. « Il reste encore beaucoup de travail pour faire davantage de place aux créations des minorités visibles », plaide-t-il.

« Les espaces pour les accueillir existent, les diffuseurs sont au rendez-vous, les spectateurs aussi. Maintenant, il faut leur donner le temps et les moyens de créer. Il faut encourager la relève et grossir le bassin de créateurs autochtones ou issus de la diversité », insiste-t-il, rappelant que la pandémie en a découragé plus d’un à continuer dans ce domaine.

Le cinéma à la traîne

Du côté du cinéma, le portrait est un peu moins reluisant, considérant la baisse enregistrée en 2022 du pourcentage de minorités visibles à l’écran selon notre exercice. « Ça montre que ça dépend vraiment des projets et que cette volonté de faire de la place à la diversité n’a rien de généralisé », commente Tania Kontoyanni. Parmi les films analysés, Chien blanc et 23 décembre tirent en effet la moyenne vers le haut.

La présidente de l’UDA retient tout de même une amélioration depuis l’affaire SLĀV et Kanata. « Il y a aujourd’hui une plus grande préoccupation pour cet enjeu. On le voit pour les rôles, et il faudrait maintenant le percevoir aussi du côté de l’écriture et de la réalisation », ajoute-t-elle, réagissant à nos chiffres qui montrent qu’en 2022 — dans le palmarès de films analysé — aucune production ne comptait un scénariste ou un réalisateur issu de minorités visibles.

Proportion d’interprètes issus de minorités visibles parmi les dix films les plus vus au Québec

L’auteur-compositeur-interprète Ricardo Lamour invite quant à lui à regarder plus loin que les chiffres : « Oui il y a plus grande représentation [des minorités] sur scène et à l’écran, mais quelle est la qualité de leur expérience ? » Les personnes noires — et ça vaut aussi pour les autres minorités visibles — décrochent rarement des premiers rôles, constate-t-il. Elles se retrouvent encore beaucoup dans des rôles stéréotypés ou se font offrir de petits rôles dans l’unique but de montrer qu’une production est inclusive, selon lui.

« La place des personnes noires dans l’industrie culturelle reste très fragile. […] Même lorsqu’elles ont trouvé une place, beaucoup marchent sur la pointe des pieds dans ce qu’elles peuvent vraiment dire au sujet d’une production. […] Je m’attends à plus de notre milieu, on peut vraiment faire mieux. »

Avec Sandrine Vieira, Alex Fontaine, Janie Dussault et Charles-Olivier L’Homme

Source: Cinq ans après «SLĀV», les minorités visibles se taillent une place

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with diversity, film, Quebec, Slav, theatre

How 20th Century Camera Film Captured a Snapshot of American Bias

2020/07/27 Leave a comment

Fascinating example of systemic racism:

In the 1960s, African American mothers noticed something wrong in their children’s seemingly innocent class photos. Every year, youngsters tidied up in their Sunday best for their school picture, which captured a milestone of childhood. But, after the Supreme Court desegregated schools with the Brown v. Board of Educationdecision in 1954, these Black mothers saw something when their children brought these treasured images home: color photos of schoolmates sitting elbow-to-elbow didn’t capture Black and white children equally.

White children were rendered as they look in everyday life, while African American children lost features of their faces and turned into ink blots. The film could not simultaneously capture both dark and light skin, since an undetected bias was swirled into the film’s formulation. For decades, this flaw of the film remained out of sight, when schools were segregated and Black boys and girls and white boys and girls were photographed separately. But with the integration of schools, Black mothers witnessed that color film left their Black children in the shadows.

In 2015, two London-based photographers, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, excavated this old color film to find out why the film could not capture the likeness of children of all races in a school photograph. When these photographers tested the film, they found that “the film wasn’t calibrated to deal with that kind of range of exposure,” said Chanarin. The film was optimized for white skin. The chemicals to dutifully pick up a range of colors had long existed, ever since the Periodic Table of Elements had become a standard item in most chemistry books. But there was a secret partiality in the combination of these elements used for the film’s chemistries, favoring one range of color over another. It was this film’s hidden history that was the reason faces in a class photo came out so differently.

Kodak executives interviewed decades later reported that their company, the primary producer of color film, was made aware of its film’s flaw, but dismissed it. Addressing complaints from Black mothers in the 1950s and 1960s might have been prescient, since this was the dawn of the civil rights era. Black was beautiful, but the status quo was more. All that changed, however, when large corporations made a fuss about Kodak’s film, which they bought in bulk for advertising. A team of two unlikely businesses—furniture makers and chocolate manufacturers—protested against Kodak’s films for discriminating against dark hues.

Both industries needed not only for dark browns to come out, but for the details to be obvious and beautifully displayed. A customer needed to be tantalized by milk chocolate, or semisweet chocolate, or dark chocolate that were differentiated in a photo. Newlyweds needed to be enticed by elm or walnut or oak tables plainly shown for their dream home. Kodak employees worked hard to fix the film, making new film formulations and testing them by taking photos, sometimes gaining weight from all the chocolate they photographed. While the complaints from Black mothers could not change Kodak, those from these companies could. By the late 1970s, new—and more inclusive—formulations of color film were in the works, and the new and improved Kodak Gold film was on the market by the following decade.

To advertise this new product, Kodak did not want to bring attention to their initial film’s bias, so they announced that the new film had the ability to take a picture of a “dark horse in low light.” This poetic phrase was code to signal that darker human skin could now be registered with this new film. This time Kodak distilled the bias out of their chemical formulation, making it possible that dark woods, dark chocolates and dark skin were able to be captured.

Technologies, such as photographic film, sometimes capture the issues and beliefs and values of the times. This bias built into technology has echoes today. Today, silicon pixels in digital photography are not optimized to register dark skin well. Additionally, some web cameras, following instructions from algorithms, are unable to recognize and follow a dark face, but do so easily for a white one. Even interracial couples, who might struggle with awkward family dynamics at Thanksgiving, struggle with getting a great photo together, too. When lovebirds of light and dark complexions want to take a selfie, they will find that one will come out, but the other will be a ghost; or that one will come out and the other will be a shadow.

What the makers of film and cameras and other technologies have experienced is a tacit subscription to a belief of a standard. In other words, they have gotten on the escalator of “this is how we do things” without asking why. Scholars would describe this type of bias as one that implicitly and uncritically accepts norms and it pervades the cellphones in our pockets. But it isn’t the cameras’ fault; they are only doing what the lines of code written by humans tell them to do. These devices capture the biases that exist in our world and, in turn, speak to whom a culture values. As our technologies become more pervasive in our lives, whom they were built for and optimized for will be an important discussion. The goal is to make sure that, moving forward, technology captures what we really want captured about ourselves.

Source: How 20th Century Camera Film Captured a Snapshot of American Bias

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with Ainissa Ramirez, film, Kodak, The Alchemy of Us

Language barrier: Why some of Canada’s diverse filmmakers are shut out of funding

2018/03/12 Leave a comment

Interesting policy question: does multiculturalism and diversity mean that films should be funded that are in neither official language, funded only if subtitled or not at all. Hard to see the logic of not funding films that are subtitled:

A small film called Ava — the story of a teenage Iranian girl facing pressures from family and society — is the biggest movie at this year’s Canadian Screen Awards. It has eight nominations and one special win already: it was announced in late January that Ava had won the Best First Feature Award, sponsored by Telefilm Canada.

Telefilm is the country’s main film funding agency, helping Canadian filmmakers get their movies made. Last fiscal year, Telefilm allocated more than $100 million to the production and promotion of Canadian films.

But Ava was not eligible for Telefilm funding.

That’s because writer-director Sadaf Foroughi is a Canadian citizen but decided to make Ava in Farsi, her native language, and film it in Iran.

The co-production with Iran and Qatar qualified as a Canadian film under the federal government’s rules, since key creative roles are filled by Canadians. But Telefilm only finances films made in English, French or Indigenous languages.

As a result, Foroughi had to rely on smaller grants from arts councils, which meant making her film on a shoestring budget, and sometimes not having enough money left over to feed herself.

“I had lots of difficulties,” she told CBC News. “Sometimes I ate less to keep all the money, because I knew that I didn’t have any other funds.”

Films in Mandarin, Korean also shut out

Foroughi is not the only diverse Canadian filmmaker facing this language barrier.

Last year, Old Stone by director Johnny Ma won the same Best First Feature award sponsored by Telefilm. It was nominated for five Canadian Screen Awards, but it also wasn’t eligible for Telefilm funding because it was made in Mandarin.

Albert Shin was born in Canada of South Korean descent, and decided to make his debut feature film, In Her Place, in Korean. His film played the Toronto International Film Festival, and garnered seven Canadian Screen Award nominations in 2015.

Even though it also qualifies as a Canadian film, it too was ineligible for funding from Telefilm because of language, a situation Shin calls “frustrating.”

He feels a film can be “uniquely Canadian” due to the artistic sensibility of its writer and director, even when it is set outside of Canada and filmed in a language other than English, French or an Indigenous language.

A ‘very difficult choice’

The executive director of Telefilm Canada says the agency receives four to five times more requests from filmmakers than it can afford to fund.

“It’s a very difficult choice to make,” said Carolle Brabant, who is stepping down this month after eight years in the job, adding, “We would love to, if only we had more money to do so.”

Brabant said there has been some discussion around changing the eligibility requirements, but “we’re not ready yet.”

Chair of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television Martin Katz pointed out that Indigenous language films used to be ineligible, as well. That rule was changed a few years ago.

“If we look at a film like Ava, which is such a beautiful film in Farsi, and it’s really about issues that young women all over the world are facing at the same time, I think we look at that and step back and ask ourselves the question ‘Why are our rules like that? Why are our rules not different?'”

Deepa Mehta’s Water was able to get Telefilm funding because she also shot a version in English — which was never released. (Mongrel Media)

Given that Canada participates in international co-productions all over the world, Katz thinks there should be a way to make those films “part of the Telefilm family.”

One veteran Canadian filmmaker did find a way. Deepa Mehta got around the language rules when she made her Oscar-nominated 2005 film Water in Hindi: she shot an English version at the same time just to qualify for Telefilm funding, even though it was never released.

Films ‘uniquely Canadian’

For those filmmakers caught in the funding gap due to their choice of language, change can’t come soon enough.

“We can make films that take place in different countries but they’re uniquely Canadian because we’re a country that embraces other cultures and other creeds and religions,” Shin said.

“We can be in the forefront of that — we have the population to do it, we have the stories to do it. This is a unique thing that Canada can bring to the world cinema stage.”

For now, Shin has to keep those ideas on hold. He’s writing his next feature film in English so it will be eligible for Telefilm funding.

Foroughi, however, is already planning her next movie in Farsi.

“[Telefilm] has to believe in us,” she said. “I think we have talent even if the film’s language is in Chinese or Korean or Arabic or Persian, but we are Canadian.”

Source: Language barrier: Why some of Canada’s diverse filmmakers are shut out of funding

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with film, Telefilm

The Significance of ‘The Salesman’ Director Asghar Farhadi’s Absence From the Oscars – The Atlantic

2017/02/03 Leave a comment

For those interested in movies and Iran, good long interview with Hamid Naficy of Northwestern University’s School of Communication (I saw The Salesman at TIFF and well-worth seeing even if not quite as good as A Separation):

While Hollywood has been loudly critical of Donald Trump since the early days of his presidential campaign, that relationship has only grown more adversarial with the former reality-TV star’s assumption of office last month. As my colleague David Sims noted Monday, the current awards season has seen many filmmakers, performers, and others in the industry calling out Trump, whether for his behavior toward women and minorities or for moving ahead with campaign promises to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico or to keep Muslims out of the country for professed national-security reasons.Then, on January 27 came a confusing and messily enacted executive order that, in part, temporarily bars citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S. It quickly emerged that the order would likely mean that at least one important face would be missing from this year’s Oscars: the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, whose film The Salesman is nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film award. A few days later, Farhadi confirmed to The New York Timesthat he wouldn’t be attending:

“I neither had the intention to not attend nor did I want to boycott the event as a show of objection, for I know that many in the American film industry and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are opposed to the fanaticism and extremism which are today taking place more than ever … However, it now seems that the possibility of this presence is being accompanied by ifs and buts which are in no way acceptable to me even if exceptions were to be made for my trip.”

In addition to celebrities condemning the executive order, which also bars refugees, the film industry has expressed its support for Farhadi. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences called the travel ban “extremely troubling,” and on Tuesday, the American Film Institute praised Farhadi’s work while saying, “We believe any form of censorship—including the restriction of travel—to be against all values we cherish as a community of storytellers.” Immediately after the order was announced, one of The Salesman’s stars, Taraneh Alidoosti, said she would be boycotting the ceremony and called Trump’s move “racist.” Others have reportedly also been prevented from attending.

The absence of Farhadi and Alidoosti at this year’s Oscars is the result of a unique dovetailing of events: the timing of Trump’s executive order ahead of the Oscars on February 26, and the fact that both the order and the Academy Awards happened to highlight Iran. Iran is one of just a handful of majority-Muslim nations to have a movie win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. (The first Iranian film to nab the award was 2011’s A Separation—also directed by Farhadi.) As a result, Hollywood is being forced to reckon with Trump’s executive order in a very concrete, albeit specific, way.

To get a better sense of the cultural and geopolitical context of Farhadi’s recognition by the Oscars and his eventual boycott, I spoke with Hamid Naficy, a professor at Northwestern University’s School of Communication and the author of several books on Iranian culture and media, including A Social History of Iranian Cinema. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

…

Cruz: Can you describe the cultural exchange between the U.S. and Iran in recent years, and how that relationship might change moving forward?

Naficy: …It’s in that context that you have this very complicated diplomatic, media, and cultural dance between Iran and the U.S. As part of this anti-American cultural diplomacy in Iran, American films were banned in the country after the Iranian Revolution, but a whole active underground market developed for them.On the one hand, the government of Iran declares that there is a cultural invasion of Iran—that Americans are trying to win the hearts and minds of Iranians, not through force but through culture. On the other hand, Iranian cinema, in particular arthouse cinema, has after the revolution become quite a credible presence in international film festivals and in commercial cinema. Those films are valued because they’re so artistic and interesting, but also partly because the view they represent of Iran is almost diametrically opposed to the view the Iranian government presents of itself and that the Western media presents of Iran.These films show Iranian people to be normal like everyone else. They love their children, their children fight with each other, they’re jealous, they’re loyal. There are all kinds of humane stories that I think make people sympathetic to Iranian society and culture. So you have these kinds of competing visions of self and other that are taking place in the two film industries.

Hollywood, from the hostage crisis onward, has produced a huge number of films that basically sort of exploit the enmity between the two countries. I guess the last big one was Argo, which was about the rescue mission of the Americans by the Canadian embassy. (Although I must say, the Canadians didn’t get a lot of credit in that film and neither did the Iranians, but that’s Hollywood.)

Source: The Significance of ‘The Salesman’ Director Asghar Farhadi’s Absence From the Oscars – The Atlantic

Filed under foreign policy Tagged with Asghar Farhadi, film, Iran, Oscars

Will Hollywood Finally Learn From the Success of ‘Hidden Figures’? – The Atlantic

2017/01/19 Leave a comment

One of the films on my list to see (our daughter saw it and highly recommended it):

… it wouldn’t be hard for major studios to increase the number of films written by women: The ratio in 2015 was 69 percent male to 31 percent female, but by commissioning just five new scripts by women per year, things would be equal by 2018. But the supposed “surprise” of Hidden Figures’s success feels especially galling because it repeats a similar conversation from a year ago. Films like Creed and Straight Outta Compton were smash hits, clearly refuting the discriminatory maxim that films about people of color are more of a box-office risk for studios. A year later, Hidden Figures is “disproving” that trend yet again—even though that kind of backwards thinking about diversity should feel entirely irrelevant by now.

In its first weekend of wide release, Hidden Figures defied tracking numbers that saw it grossing less than the fourth weekend of Rogue One; it made $22 million, also beating out that week’s new blockbuster, Underworld: Brood Wars. For the subsequent four-day Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend, Hidden Figuresactually increased its gross, making $26 million and staying at number one, holding off the expansion of La La Land, the horror film The Bye Bye Man, and Paramount’s broad-skewing children’s adventure Monster Trucks.

That last film provides a particularly interesting lesson in Hollywood economics. The industry, in general, has focused in recent years on films that have the potential to be launching pads for major franchises. As the movie business becomes more globally focused and tries to compete with TVs that can offer a near-theater-quality viewing experience at home, splashy big-budget extravaganzas have become a routine matter of course. This is frequently put forward as an explanation for why Hollywood seems loath to cast actors of color in leading roles, because they supposedly have less market pull worldwide (an argument soundly disproven by hits like the Fast & Furious franchise or Star Wars: The Force Awakens, as well as many smaller-scale films).

And yet Monster Trucks is a patently silly piece of kids entertainment about a young man who finds a squid-like monster living in his truck. It stars Lucas Till, hardly an A-lister (though he had a small role in the recent X-Men movies), and cost $125 million to make—$100 million more than Hidden Figures. Devoting such a large budget to a film with little brand recognition that was basically guaranteed to get terrible reviews was quickly regarded as a disastrous decision. Viacom, the company that owns the Monster Trucks studio Paramount Pictures, took a $115 million write-down in earnings last September in anticipation of its failure (it opened to a lackluster $15 million last weekend).

This is what Hollywood’s emphasis on big-budget films with “broad appeal” inevitably leads to: hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on toy-focused action films with no real audience. For the cost of Monster Trucks, Paramount could have made five Hidden Figures—smaller films, focused on telling grounded stories to fill a market gap that studios continue to ignore. That Hidden Figures’s success has to serve as a lesson to Hollywood in 2017 is ridiculous, but the lesson is nonetheless there to be learned. Audiences are hungry for films that look beyond the movie industry’s narrow worldview. It’s time to start delivering them.

Source: Will Hollywood Finally Learn From the Success of ‘Hidden Figures’? – The Atlantic

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with diversity, film, Hidden Figures, Hollywood

The burdens and expectations of this year’s critically acclaimed, diversity-forward films – The Globe and Mail

2017/01/07 Leave a comment

Good read on the industry’s ongoing diversity challenge and how this year’s films are strong award contenders (I saw Moonlight at TIFF and well worth seeing):

You know Moonlight even if you haven’t stepped inside a movie theatre in months. Ever since Barry Jenkins’s intimate drama about one black man’s coming of age premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September, it has dominated the cultural conversation. Walk a block in any major city and you’ll encounter giant bus ads touting its brilliance. Read any film critic’s year-end Top 10 list and you’ll find it near the top (Metacritic has the film topping 52 lists). Ask any industry insider and they will tell you Moonlight is the film to beat at this year’s Academy Awards.

Which is all quite a radical shift from this time last year, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominations for the 2016 Oscars, and exactly zero non-white performers were nominated in the acting categories. For the second year in a row. In an instant, the social-media hashtag #OscarsSoWhite became easy shorthand for the industry, with the Oscars themselves cast as, in Chris Rock’s words, “the White People’s Choice Awards.”

But Moonlight, and a handful of other films, might represent a long-overdue turnaround. In the last quarter of 2016 – what is traditionally known as awards season, when studios release their prestige pictures – there has been a notable surge of heavily marketed, critically acclaimed, diversity-forward films dominating the marketplace: Moonlight, certainly, but also the historical drama Hidden Figures; the interracial drama Loving; the Barack Obama biopic Barry; two monumental documentaries from Ava DuVernay (13th) and Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro); the tearjerker Lion starring Dev Patel; and the powerful Fences, directed by and starring Denzel Washington.

All promise to be strong presences at this year’s Academy Awards – and all offer the hope of a sea change in the industry, an acknowledgment that Hollywood is finally waking up to the need for diverse voices, both in front of and behind the camera.

Or is it the mere illusion of a sea change?

The industry has been down this road before, after all. In 2002, Denzel Washington and Halle Berry became the first black performers to win both top acting Oscars in the same year (for, respectively, Training Day and Monster’s Ball). Five years later, seven performers of colour dominated the 2006 Academy Awards’ acting categories: Will Smith, Djimon Hounsou, Eddie Murphy, Rinko Kikuchi, Adriana Barraza and eventual winners Forest Whitaker and Jennifer Hudson. But instead of those moments leading to permanent change, the industry fell back on whatever promises those recognitions may have implied.

“When Denzel and Berry won, the industry said, ‘Well, that’ll do for the next 20 years! Good job, everyone, pack it up!’” jokes Darnell Hunt, director of UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and an expert on diversity in the film business. It’s a good line, but there are real tears mixed with the humour. While Hollywood considers itself a bastion of liberal values and progressive politics, it has consistently proven loath to highlight diverse performers and filmmakers, and in recent years has even lost what little progress had been made. (Last February, Hunt released a study that found that film jobs still go to “overwhelmingly white male performers and filmmakers,” with minorities losing ground in acting, writing, directing and producing jobs since his previous study came out in 2015.)

Is Moonlight, then, and its fellow crop of Oscar favourites – each worthy in their own way, each carrying unfair burdens and expectations – part of a deliberate reaction to the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, or a simple matter of good timing bereft of any meaningful industry change?

“In the case of Loving, it certainly isn’t a reaction – the movie’s been in the works for four years, and that’s just the kind of gestation period it takes for features,” says Peter Saraf, one of the drama’s producers. “But we are seeing more films that are starting to engage on issues that have been ignored for a while.”

Cameron Bailey, artistic director for the Toronto International Film Festival, agrees, though adds that there’s another factor to consider. “What we’re seeing is a reaction to the establishment that elevates movies to the public consciousness. The companies that sell and buy movies, the exhibitors, the critics – all those areas are probably paying more attention and are more conscious of trying to address diversity than a year or two ago,” says Bailey, whose festival this past fall hosted premieres of Moonlight, Loving, I Am Not Your Negro and Lion, as well as a sneak peek of Hidden Figures. “It all makes it impossible to ignore the great work coming from African-American or Asian American or Latin American artists.”

This cultural elevation, Bailey says, can be framed as an evolving democratization of just how movies get valued. “It used to be critics telling audiences what was great and what they had to see. And it still is, but it’s also Twitter and Facebook now, and Black Twitter has also been incredibly vocal and increasingly influential,” he says, referring to the loosely defined network of social-media users focused on interests to the black community, from politics to the arts. “Look at the reaction on Black Twitter to, say, the new Black Panther movie being developed by Disney. Every time there’s a casting announcement, Twitter freaks out! That’s great, but what it tells you is that people who make movies and green-light them are finally paying attention to social media – and if they want to make money, they follow that interest.”

“We talk about the industry as if it’s a monolith, and of course, at the end of the day, it isn’t – all those people sitting in those rooms making decisions are ultimately paying lip service to the notion that they want to get their product to an audience,” says Nina Shaw, a lawyer and industry power player who represents some of the top black artists working in Hollywood today, including DuVernay and musician John Legend. “So when you see something you like, you tweet about it, and use all your social-media outlets to encourage other people to do the same. And I’m telling you, the folks on this side of town are looking at those things and using them as indicators as to what audiences want to see.”

Source: The burdens and expectations of this year’s critically acclaimed, diversity-forward films – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with diversity, entertainment, film, TIFF

Toronto Film Festival: Black Filmmaking Has A Breakthrough : NPR

2016/09/21 Leave a comment

TIFF does have an amazing diversity of films, with this but one example:

This year we’ve seen endless loops of online commentary and Hollywood hand-wringing about the enduring whiteness of American cinema and how structural challenges continue to restrict filmmakers of color. So it was not surprising that there was so much anticipation around the October release of first-time director Nate Parker’s film The Birth of a Nation. The story of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion and self-empowerment, as seen through the artistic vision of a young, black filmmaker, caused a bidding war at the Sundance Film Festival at the height of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign.

But by the time the Toronto International Film Festival opened last week, Parker was embroiled in a much louder conversation about sexual assault and toxic masculinity after debate about his acquittal on rape charges during his college days resurfaced. A month before the film that would prove Hollywood’s diverse bona fides was to open, it was already in full-blown public relations free fall.

Fortunately, The Birth of a Nation was neither the only nor the most anticipated film about black life to screen in Toronto, which hosts the largest film festival in North America; one that sets the tone for the Oscars and tests the viability of serious American cinema. Festival artistic director Cameron Baily told me that this year’s festival may have been its blackest edition ever. It pushes back against the idea that Hollywood can only absorb one black story at a time, and challenges the limited parameters of a “black film”.

This year’s festival shifted the conversation about diversity from a focus on the absence of black faces in movies to a feast of cinematic styles and stories as wide-ranging as the black experience itself.

Most importantly, the films opening at Toronto explored stories about justice, family, and selfhood without didactic or conventional Hollywood bluster about race. From the struggle for interracial marriage rights in the restrained drama Loving to a young boy’s battle to reconcile his masculinity and sexuality in Barry Jenkins’ lyrical second film Moonlight, this year’s program introduced a new set of faces and performances for critics to savor and nominate.

Indian-born filmmaker Mira Nair premiered Queen of Katwe, a story about a young Ugandan woman’s journey to become an international chess champion. The movie was filmed in Uganda and South Africa and opens in wide release as a Disney production. It stars Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo (Selma), and features no white saviors.

Perhaps the best-received film of the festival to directly confront the limited portrayal of blackness on screen was I Am Not Your Negro, filmmaker Raoul Peck’s searing new documentary about writer James Baldwin. The film won the festival’s prestigious top documentary prize and was purchased for wide release by Magnolia pictures. Made in collaboration with the Baldwin estate, Peck’s documentary tells the story of American racism through the words of Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, archive interviews, and his essays on race relations. It features no talking heads, hazy footage or conventional biographical framing devices. Instead, it blends Baldwin’s writing with arresting footage of contemporary police brutality to underscore the writer’s powerful insight and voice.

At this year’s Toronto festival, neither the filmmakers nor the curators wished to have these films categorized as ‘diverse’ and, therefore, seen as niche. There’s such range in the films, Bailey told me, that to just “call them all ‘black films’ really reduces their context, their variety, their differences and their power.”

Source: Toronto Film Festival: Black Filmmaking Has A Breakthrough : Code Switch : NPR

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with diversity, film, TIFF

Diversity of Marvel comics not reflected in movies

2016/05/09 Leave a comment

More on the lack of diversity in Hollywood:

Powered by a cast of comic-book characters generations have grown up with, Captain America: Civil War appears set for another record-breaking weekend.

But while the familiar faces are part of the allure, drop by your local comic shop (it is free comic book day after all) and you’ll see many of your old favourites undergoing radical makeovers.

….But the recent controversy over the new trailer for Doctor Strange suggested there’s still hesitation when it comes to displaying diverse characters. In the upcoming Marvel movie Tilda Swinton portrays the Ancient One, a character who was originally Tibetan.

Actor and activist George Takei was among those who blasted Marvel’s move.

“They cast Tilda because they believe white audiences want to see white faces,” he wrote on Facebook. “Audiences, too, should be aware of how dumb and out of touch the studios think we are.”

Considering a top-selling comic title reaches an audience of only about 200,000 readers in North America, it’s amazing the industry has any impact at all.

Yet the movies and the comics books are tied together in other ways. De Landro points out that many of the TV and film producers working for Marvel started in the publishing division. They understand the characters and the desire for change.

“There’s that hunger, that real need to see these characters out there and for people to see themselves represented. I think that’s going to translate,” he said.

And while publishers spin out new stories every month, multi-million dollar blockbusters have much longer gestational period. Considering the fact both Warner Brothers and Disney both have committed to film schedules stretching into 2020, the movies will be playing catch-up for many more years to come.

Source: Diversity of Marvel comics not reflected in movies – Arts & Entertainment – CBC News

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with diversity, film, Hollywood, Marvel

Top-Grossing Films Still Mostly White, Straight and Male

2015/08/08 Leave a comment

More confirmation of the biases we all have (Hollywood responds to these as well as reinforcing them):

Looking at the 700 top-grossing movies from 2007 to 2014, researchers at the Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California found that on-screen characters are predominantly straight, white and male. Here are some of their most notable findings:

Gender: Only 30.2% of speaking roles or named characters in those 700 movies were women. Of the top 100 movies in 2014, only a fifth had a leading or co-leading actor who was a woman, and women only made up 15.8% of behind-the-scenes roles—directors, producers, writers.
Race: Of the top 100 movies last year, 73.1% of all characters were white, and only 17 of those movies had a leading or co-leading actor who was a minority. The study authors say this represents “no change” when compared to castings in the top 700 films from 2007-2014.
LGBT: In the top movies of 2014, only 19 characters were gay, lesbian or bisexual, and none of them were transgender. The LGB characters portrayed reflect other industry biases: they, too, are mostly white men.

Top-Grossing Films Still Mostly White, Straight and Male | TIME.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with film, Hollywood, movies

Do Australian Movies Really Reflect Our Multiculturalism?

2015/01/28 Leave a comment

Interesting discussion and debate over diversity and Australian film (Canadian record not so great either):

But many others strongly believe that national cinema industries, especially publicly-funded ones, have some responsibility to open hearts and minds – and that great stories are missed if diversity is ignored.

“Filmmaking is about having something to say and letting people think about it,” says Caradee of his own cinema practise. His production company’s stated aims include challenging audiences and asking questions about identity and justice. The radicalisation of young Australian men, a hot political issue, is a dominant theme in the planned My Country.

“In TV we tell these stories because we have SBS and the ABC, but there’s no equivalent in film,” says Caradee. More diversity within the filmmaker ranks will result in more diverse films, he adds.

“When stories are written by people not from the culture in which they’re set, they come up fake and the rhythms of speech are wrong,” says scriptwriter and assessor Karin Altmann. She estimates that of the 130-160 scripts she reads annually, only about a dozen are not driven by Anglo Saxon creators.

Caradee is for affirmative action focussed on multicultural groups and involving mentoring and technical upskilling; she’s more into creating opportunities, more broadly. “Writers, emerging filmmakers, people from other cultures: all have less opportunity, and when you open up opportunities it is surprising what happens,” she says.

… Another aspect to multiculturalism is Australian cinema’s appalling record of colour-blind casting. In other words, lead roles are usually played by white people, and taxi drivers and criminals by brown or black people.

Do Australian Movies Really Reflect Our Multiculturalism? | Movie News | SBS Movies.

And from Queensland (where Brisbane is located), strong support for inclusive multiculturalism prior to the state elections:

But he [Premier Campbell Newman] also asked the new citizens to respect Australia’s “democracy, our rule of law, our court system”.

“Multiculturalism works,” he said.

“It makes us stronger, it makes us richer. There are all sorts of wonderful things that take Australia forward from being a successful multicultural community.”

Mr Newman said the world had given Australia much and it was up to its citizens to embrace the melting pot of cultures.

“We have ties to people all around the world that help us economically,” he said.

“We have fantastic things that we can see and do, food and dance and festivals and it works.

“Today I say to you it only works while we continue to work hard to embrace one another, to understand one another, to actually be enthusiastic and appreciate of that diversity.

“There have been some things that have happened in the last year or so and we must keep that well and truly behind us. We must say that we are going to continue to make this country work and be so successful.”

Multiculturalism works: Newman

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Australia, diversity, film, Queensland

← Older posts

Multicultural Meanderings

Cinq ans après «SLĀV», les minorités visibles se taillent une place

How 20th Century Camera Film Captured a Snapshot of American Bias

Language barrier: Why some of Canada’s diverse filmmakers are shut out of funding

Films in Mandarin, Korean also shut out

A ‘very difficult choice’

Films ‘uniquely Canadian’

The Significance of ‘The Salesman’ Director Asghar Farhadi’s Absence From the Oscars – The Atlantic

Will Hollywood Finally Learn From the Success of ‘Hidden Figures’? – The Atlantic

The burdens and expectations of this year’s critically acclaimed, diversity-forward films – The Globe and Mail

Toronto Film Festival: Black Filmmaking Has A Breakthrough : NPR

Diversity of Marvel comics not reflected in movies

Top-Grossing Films Still Mostly White, Straight and Male

Do Australian Movies Really Reflect Our Multiculturalism?

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