The Success of Women Documentary Filmmakers

The news regarding women directors of fictional films in Hollywood continues to be bleak: in 2007, only 6 percent of these films were directed by women. But the non-fiction film world is a whole different story. While no one has exact figures, anecdotally most experts in the documentary community believe that women directors make up at least 50 percent of the directing ranks. Take a look at all the major film festivals that include documentaries and you will see women's names as prominent as the men's.

Lisa Jackson is a woman on a mission. She is determined to relay testimony from the thousands of women of the Congo who were raped and mutilated during many years of war. Like the team of producer Abby Disney and director Gini Retiker -- who tell how the courageous women of Liberia stood up and said no more to war -- Jackson is part of a growing movement of women filmmakers who, as Cara Mertes of Sundance notes, are making an impact by "matching their passion for storytelling with an issue."

They are pushing the boundaries of the documentary form by taking on daunting, large-scale topics and exploring them through intimate, relatable stories. Abby Disney was in Liberia for the inauguration of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first African female head of state. Moved by the legions of women behind the Sirleaf victory, Disney felt compelled to bring the story to the public so it would not disappear. She used her own funds to start a production company and hooked up with Retiker to make Pray the Devil Back to Hell. She is now exploring the best distribution mechanism for the film, which recently premiered and took the best documentary feature prize at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film has already made its way to such countries in conflict as Georgia and Sudan, where women use screenings to help create their own peace movements.

Jackson, a 35-year doc veteran, had no funding when she began filming The Greatest Silence. She cashed in her own frequent flyer miles to get to Kinshasa. Once there, she got a U.N. ID from a friend and made her way east. As she said in a recent interview "I was a one-person band. I shot it, did the sound, directed, and edited it." Her experience told her "that once I got over there and started filming, I would get support. People would see the women's faces and hear their stories and realize what a compelling subject it was." Now these women's stories have gone mainstream. Jackson's film premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival (where it was awarded a special prize), aired on HBO and will be shown June 19 at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in New York.

So how come women documentarians have achieved a success that has eluded those in the fiction business? It could be because "a lot of the funders in the broadcast world are also women," says Sean Farnel, the programming director at Hot Docs, one of the big documentary festivals in Canada. It's true. Everywhere you look there are women -- from Sheila Nevins and her team that run HBO's documentary division; to the three-year-old women-run producing/funding entity Chicken and Egg Pictures, which, in a variety of ways, has supported 37 women-directed films (including Lioness and Going on 13, which both premiered recently at the Tribeca Film Festival); to Women Make Movies, which has been distributing, promoting and producing films by and about women since 1972.

Another reason is not so upbeat: documentaries have lower budgets, smaller staffs and, in turn, less prestige. Cara Mertes, director of the documentary film program at the Sundance Institute, says that the doc field "is notoriously not a good way to make a living and men tend to be interested in things where there is a lot of potential for a pay-off so they will gravitate towards fictional films."