Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat told a Tokyo International Film Festival audience this weekend that women filmmakers face built-in disadvantages created by underfunding and by the institutions that control the money. Serbian director Jelena Maksimović joined her on a panel about the future of women’s cinema, and both pointed to funding bodies as the place where change must begin.
Sadat, who sat on this year’s Venice competition jury, said the low share of women-directed films in that lineup surprised her. The imbalance, she argued, takes root long before festival selectors see a finished film, starting “at the development level.” She drew on her own career to make the point. Sadat, now based in Germany, opened this year’s Berlinale with “No Good Men.” Making films in Afghanistan, she said, carries criminal risk, but the bias she meets in European funding is quieter. It sits, she said, “in the system.”
Maksimović, whose “Until the Day Ends” screened in Venice’s Orizzonti section, described how political pressure reshapes public film money. Film Center Serbia worked decently for several years, she said, until the outgoing government cut its funding entirely. She framed the move as retaliation against filmmakers who backed the student anti-corruption protests. She said repairing the damage will take time. Filmmakers working outside the mainstream share a real solidarity, she added, though it forms a bubble apart from the large funds that shape the industry.
The session, part of the festival’s Tokyo Talk series at the TIFF Lounge in Tokyo Midtown Hibiya, was moderated by film scholar Takasaki Ikuko. It followed other events at the festival on women’s careers, including an animation symposium earlier that day on four women directing in the anime industry.
Toward the end, an audience member pressed the panel on how to produce material change rather than gestures, noting that only about four films in the festival’s selection were directed by women. Sadat answered by returning to Venice. Maksimović called for reform at the source. “We have to change the systems,” she said, starting with funding and the committees that award it. The panelists did not announce any specific initiatives, and the festival did not respond to the audience member’s figure during the session.
