On March 23, new women empowerment campaign Actually She Can teamed up with Patricia Arquette to host a breakfast celebrating women in film and to start a discussion around the gap between the amount of female filmmakers in the business and men.
Also joining them were Anne Munger, Emily Harrold, and Erin Sanger, three up-and-coming documentary filmmakers whose shorts are apart of Actually She Can’s #ASC film series to showcase women in film. The three documentaries are also going to be screened at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
Patricia Arquette started a dialogue last year with the Oscar acceptance speech for her tear jerking role in Boyhood when she used her speech to highlight the discrepancies in wage equality for men and women. The goal of the event for these women was to help “millennial women turn their ambitions into a reality.” The four women talked about in the importance of diversity of film and having all sorts of different voices heard, not only women but also people of color. Arquette explained, “You want to have the story of human beings, the story of art. And if you’re limiting your vision, then you’re limiting the story of human beings.”
When asked about haters that respond with the argument “it’s not your time in Hollywood. It’s about the quality of the work,” Arquette responded, “That’s always the convenient argument, that people made throughout time about how to repress other people. That they’re lesser, that they don’t have a story to tell, that they don’t have the skill set, that they aren’t smart enough. I think that’s not a valid argument at all. Because when women aren’t given the opportunity to do something, you can’t judge them without a look at what they can do. We have very few filmmakers…but Kathryn Bigelow [director of The Hurt Locker] won a few years ago. These things do happen when we have the chance.” She followed up with, “Anyway, those sorts of arguments are very paleolithic. You can’t talk caveman to me,” she joked.
Actually She Can is also teaming up with Refinery29 to give away two Hudson Passes to this year’s Tribeca Film Festival with a thousand dollars. Visit their website to find out how to enter.
