Women's Voices Now Film Festival

THE NEED AND OUR APPROACH

Currently, female and femme-identifying filmmakers still face difficult access to the film industry. Their films remain underfunded and under-distributed, especially if their films are documentaries or focus on women or minorities - this is the Celluloid Ceiling. Yet, their work highlights important stories that deserve to be shared and seen by all, and research points to the quality of these films and interest from general audiences. (source: "Gender & Short Films: Emerging Female Filmmakers and the Barriers Surrounding their Careers” – Stacy Smith, Ph.D., Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism). In other words, to ensure that the stories of women and girls are represented just as much on screen, and contribute to a more egalitarian society, we need to support more women filmmakers behind the camera.

The Women’s Voices Now Film Festival was designed to address these specific, gender-based obstacles. Our festival promotes emerging female filmmakers using social-change films to advocate for women’s and girls’ rights around the world. We focus on supporting documentary filmmakers in particular, because they are the most under-funded category yet play an essential role in highlighting authentic, high quality stories about women and girls around the world. To do so, we offer:

• Visibility

We provide emerging filmmakers with a global platform where they can share essential, authentic stories with global audiences. In reaching these audiences, our filmmakers are able to leverage their social-change films to influence public discourse and, ideally, action on the ground on pressing women’s rights issues. This year, we are welcoming a Film festival assistant who recently arrived in the US from Afghanistan, where they were running a film festival. We are excited to welcome this new team member and to enrich our festival with their own expertise.

• Support

Filmmakers enter to win one of eight awards and a cash prize to invest in their next project, and sometimes to help them cover their living expenses or other urgent needs. For the 2024 film festival, we will be increasing the total amount of cash prizes from $12,000 to $13,000, recognizing that many independent female filmmakers have faced financial difficulties in the last year.

• Network

We create a supportive space and opportunities for filmmakers to connect and increase access to film industry professionals. This season, we will organize a second private event for all pre-selected filmmakers and local film industry professionals, to further support their professional development.

Through our festival, we are supporting important films that will raise awareness of specific issues pertaining to women’s and girls’ rights around the world. But we are also and mostly striving to invest in filmmakers who are dedicating their work to create positive social change by supporting their careers in the long term. That's why we also strive to maintain a relationship for as long as possible with them: we want to be able to continue to support them however we can, and to measure both the impact the festival had on their career, and the impact their film had on the topic it addressed. To date, we have received over 1180 film submissions from 88 countries, awarded $130,000 in cash prizes to filmmakers and gathered online audience members from 178 countries.

OUR WORK IN ACTION

Here are the examples of our our last three Leslie J Sacks Grand Prize recipients (2023, 2022, 2021):

Clementine Malpas and Sam French co-directed “With This Breath I Fly”, which follows two Afghan women, Gulnaz and Farida, for a 10-year-period, including when they were imprisoned for "moral crimes" during the international occupation of Afghanistan. Gulnaz, who was raped and impregnated by her uncle, was then sentenced to jail for having a baby outside of marriage. But thanks to this film, Gulnaz became the international face of women’s rights in Afghanistan, featured on numerous broadcast outlets and hundreds of publications, including on the cover of the New York Times. It was only this publicity and international pressure that led to an unprecedented pardon by President Karzai, and the liberation of Gulnaz. This pardon also set a precedent and Afghanistan’s Attorney General ordered a review of all moral crimes cases in the courts. It also helped push the Afghan parliament to pass the Elimination of Violence Against Women act, which outlawed marital rape. Sadly, the return of the Talibans in Afghanistan undid all this amazing progress.

María Lobo is a Spanish journalist and filmmaker. After learning about women being imprisoned for up to 40 years for homicide after suffering pregnancy complications in El Salvador and in partnership with several Salvadoran and Spanish organizations, she decided that creating a documentary highlighting the consequences of these laws on the lives of women and girls would be a powerful tool to advocate for change. She co-directed "Indebted to All Women" with Roi Guitián, which won the Leslie J. Sacks Grand Prize at the 2022 Women’s Voices Now Film Festival. A few months later, their film was used as documentation in a case brought up to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, leading to the successful release of all the women featured in the film, and since then, more than 60 other women!

In 2021, Willow O'Feral won the Grand Prize for "Sisters Rising", a documentary following six Native American women fighting to restore personal and tribal sovereignty in the face of ongoing sexual violence against Indigenous women in the United States. On her experience with the Women's Voices Now film festival, Willow shared: “Winning the Leslie J. Sacks Best Documentary Feature Award was one of the huge highlights in our launch of 'SISTERS RISING' out into the world. We were honored by the recognition, aided by the award money which we rolled back into the outreach and marketing of our documentary, and personally touched by the warm and engaging reception of our film that the WVN Film Festival created. The whole experience was wonderful and affirming. Thank you for such a meaningful experience.”

This past cycle, Sarah Noa Bozenhardt who received the award for Best First Time Filmmaker, Documentary Feature for her film “Among Us Women” shared this about her experience taking part in the Women’s Voices Now Film Festival:

“For me, it was an honor and an immense joy to participate in the Women's Voices Now Festival. Far beyond winning an award – which was just "the icing on the cake" – being able to learn about the existence of a festival focused on women and girls' rights around the world, that also encourages and invests in the growth of female directors, being able to watch so many films with so many different realities from all continents and to connect with a network of people who vibrate for the same purpose was profoundly transformative and inspiring. It was one of the most beautiful experiences I've ever had in my career as a documentary filmmaker. I hope we can keep in touch and one day meet in person. Thank you so much for everything”

FESTIVAL DETAILS & TIMELINE

Submissions are open between August and November. Submitted films must address or shine light upon issues affecting women and/or girls through a social-change lens, but are not limited to a specific theme.

Filmmakers enter to win eight awards:

• Leslie J. Sacks Grand Prize Award for Best Documentary Feature - $3,500
• Best Documentary Short - $2,000
• Best Emerging Filmmaker Feature - $1,500
• Best Emerging Filmmaker Short - $1,000
• Best Creative Documentary Feature - $1,500
• Best Creative Documentary Short - $1,000
• Best Youth Documentary Short - $500
• Best Human Rights Documentary - $2,000

Our outreach strategy combines:

- direct targeted outreach to film institutions and schools all around the world, with a focus on global regions and communities that remain particularly underrepresented (South America, First Nations, Sub-Saharan Africa)

- raising our festival's visibility through advertising it on filmmaking platforms such as FilmFreeway and promoting it across our social media and newsletter (current reach of 135,000).

Competing films go through three rounds of selection. The final selection is made in February by our 9 jury members, which is made up of film professionals and gender equality/human rights experts.

The 2024 Festival will be kicked off on March 26th, 2024 during a live streamed event. All preselected films will be available for viewing between March 25-April 30, 2024. Our live Award Ceremony will take place on April 25th, 2024, during which awards winners will be announced.

Pre-selected filmmakers will be invited to take part in private networking sessions: one with our jury members, during which they can receive direct feedback on their film and connect with other filmmakers; and one with film industry professionals, during which they can deepen their knowledge of the industry around funding, content acquisition, and distribution. These will respectively take place on April 4th and 11th, 2024.

Women’s Voices Now thanks the Dudley T. Dougherty Foundation for its support during our last Film Festival cycle and for its consideration to support our Festival again. The Festival’s goals align perfectly with the Dudley T. Dougherty Foundation’s mission to “give a clear voice for those who wish to be a part of the many, worthy, forces for change in our world”.

The grant from the Dudley T. Dougherty Foundation will help us to implement a second in-person screening event of the film that will be awarded the Leslie J Sacks Grand Prize. Given the impact made by this past year’s screening event, it is clear that we should strive to gather in-person and create a space to learn and reflect on women’s rights together, and think about next steps collectively.

This year again, we would also use the grant generously provided by the Dudley Dougherty Foundation to fund the position of Film Festival Assistant, which is critical to ensure that our Festival’s visibility keeps growing throughout the years thanks to direct outreach and marketing campaigns. As a result, it will attract a higher volume of films from a more diverse range of countries and regions around the world.