The Sitges Festival won’t be releasing the winners of this edition for a few days, but it already has a winner to present to moviegoers and the industry. Estíbaliz Burgaleta has been awarded the ‘Girls just want to have a fan’ scholarship, designed by the organization to encourage the creation of gender productions with a charitable female stigma towards the development of fantasy films. Burgaleta will make a short presentation of her feature film project ‘El Chino’, the story of a zombie invasion in a supermarket From classics like the Korean blockbuster movie ‘Train to Busan’ as well as Paco Plaza’s national hit ‘Rec 3’. A screenwriter since 2012, this Madrilenian has several short films written and directed, with experience from successful series like ‘Velvet’ and participation in the recently released Netflix show ‘You are not special’, but Based on the initiative of the Sitges Festival, she can leap into the king of the cinema format, a step that many talented women are still trying to take.
Mónica García Massagué, organizer of the festival’s WomaninFan project and managing director of the Sitges Festival Foundation, is determined to foster opportunities so that many of the women entering the cinematographic path of the fantasy genre can continue with their first projects. aspect Nine finalists who can attend industry events planned at the Festival to strengthen relationships in the industry and facilitate business contacts and networking.
García Massagué also presents a book these days that compiles articles about the involvement of female filmmakers in the genre that aims to give a different perspective to the phenomenon. festival directorAngel Roomfilm teacher and critic Violeta Kovacsics or producer and programmer of film festivals Heidi Honeycutt Some of the voices in the filmography that contribute to the vision of the female gaze give different keys to the state of the matter.
invisible
The history of cinema was erased from women as a book parade Thea Von PortWife of Fritz Lang, but above all the screenwriter of the legendary ‘Metropolis’, pioneering American director Alice Guy – Blache and others hacking their way into a male-dominated industry Stephanie Rothmann She is the first woman to receive a Director’s Guild of America fellowship and replicate her work in B-productions of the 1960s and 1970s, breaking the tradition of being a woman or a family member to shape her professional career.
Are there any women’s movies?
In the hands of the festival’s programmer Diego López-Fernández, we also learn about the evolution of female creators in Spanish fantasy cinema. Although with the downside of being boxed up as auteur filmmakers, far from the big box office hits that only stars like Kathryn Bigelow have touched, they have been a cultural hotbed for female voices in the genre. “There is no women’s cinema,” says Kovacsics, who asserts the value of female filmmakers’ contributions to normalizing the role of women in the genre beyond gender perspectives.
Industry quotas
The debate over quotas was also covered in an interview with filmmaker and programmer Annick Mahnert, one of the most influential and director of the Frontières industry forum. fears and anxieties that we know from our own sensitivities,” he explains. Subsidies and help needed, but quotas… “it is the quality of productions that see the light that will help strengthen women’s place in the industry,” he settles.
Claire Denis, Ana Lily Amirpour, Jessica Hausner, Céline Sciamma, Jennifer Kent, Julia Ducournau, as well as Patty Jenkins (‘Wonderwoman’) and Karyn Kusama (‘Jennyfer’s body’) or Mary Lambert (‘Living Cemetery’) crawl through the book. There are different approaches to the genre.
“The future? Well, to be able to answer the question almost without thinking: quotes a director whose surname is used to discovering his own stylejust like we do when talking about a Lynch- or Hitchcock-inspired movie,” says Mónica García.