STA, March 26, 2018 –– There are only a handful of women in the Slovenian film industry, but the national film centre will work towards the EU goal to change this trend by 2020 so that half of all directors, screen writers and other professionals are women.
As many as 90% of all films co-funded by national funds over the past twenty-two years have been directed by men, shows a recently presented study.
What is more, men have produced some 80% of all films and 70% of all screenplays have been written by male screenwriters.
Women have had little success in applying for funds for feature films and screenplay development, shows the 1995-2017 study, which focussed in particular on the last six years.
No feature film has been directed by a woman over the past two years, while there have been only four in the last seven years as opposed to 44 directed by men.
"Figures show that quite some women directors apply for funds to develop a project, a screenplay, but they do not get the green light," Slovenian Film Centre (SFC) director Nataša Bučar has recently told the newspaper Dnevnik.
Since women's projects are as good as those of their male colleagues, she believes women are less motivated to press on with a project once their pre-production plans have been turned down by the SFC.
Although the Slovenian film industry had already been vibrant before Slovenia became independent in 1991, it produced no woman director at the time of former Yugoslavia.
Going down in history as the first Slovenian woman to make a feature film was Maja Weiss, whose Guardian of the Frontier (Varuh Meje) came out in 2002.
Weiss's award-winning drama with elements of mystery was followed later in the same year by Hanna Slak's Blind Spot (Slepa Pega).
So far, Slovenian women film directors have made only eight feature films with national financial support.
Apart from the two from 2002, Maja Weiss also made Installation of Love (Instalacija Ljubezni, 2007), and Slak shot Tea (2007) and Miner (Rudar, 2017).
Janja Glogovac made L ... for Love (L ... Kot Ljubezen, 2007), Dafne Jemeršić shot Reality (2008) and Sonja Prosenc shot Tree (Drevo, 2014).
At a conference at which the SFC presented the study, Slak stressed that "gender equality in the audio-visual industry is key to equality in the society in general".
The conference, held at the arts centre Cankarjev Dom, was aimed at bringing gender inequality to the public's awareness and calling for change.
Its participants, among them several women film directors and senior Euroimages officials, said that it was a step in the right direction.
According to SFC director Bučar, Eurimages's 2018-2020 gender equality strategy aimed at securing a 50:50 representation of men and women in Europe is attainable.
She does not favour quotas, but soft measures such as the promotion of the profession of film director among women.
Sweden is proof this is possible; Kristina Börjeson of the Swedish Film Institute said that in 2013-2016 they managed to raise the share of women film directors to 49%.
However, she admitted the share had dropped as early as 2017, simply because they had stopped paying attention to the issue for a while.
