“If there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle.” // “A filmmaker is a filmmaker.”
Kathryn Bigelow won the first Academy Award ever presented to a female director, for her outstanding Best Picture winner, “The Hurt Locker.”
Gendered Awards
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presents awards in many gender neutral categories like Director and Screenwriter, but also separates Actor and Actress categories.
Other awards programs include The Man Booker Prize for Fiction (without reference to gender), and the Orange Prize for Fiction, for “excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world.”
In her Huffington Post entry, Vivian Norris de Montaigu relates the story of fifteen years ago inviting Bigelow to joining the board of a Women in Cinema Film Festival (which later became part of the larger Seattle International film festival).
“Ms. Bigelow turned us down, politely, asserting the fact that she was a filmmaker, period. Not a female filmmaker, but a filmmaker full stop.
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Site last updated: 19 Jun 2013
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I am thrilled that Kathryn Bigelow is a a filmaker, full stop. The fewer descriptive adjectives in creative contexts the better. “Artist”, “musician” “filmaker”, “writer”-we could go on-most of us prefer to have our jobs described without a gender tag line.
For those who are only approaching their work from a particular viewpoint, they are free to make a different choice, but I’ve found I can usually figure that out without having to add any adjectives. Let the work speak for itself.