#marchdirectedbywomen ⚧️

March is honestly such a great month. Last year I was very ambitious so I only watched movies directed by women (here's my Letterboxd list of march watches + a list with some of my favorite movies directed by women cause why not), I even made a youtube video on the subject ("what i watched in march (directed by women)")... This year I was busier and more tired, so I decided to take on less of the responsibility myself and instead share it with others.

I feel very passionate about Women In Film and I guess women in general - and by women I don't only mean the conservative/archaic definition of a "woman", but one that includes all the subjectivities who identify as a woman and suffer the sexist oppression of the patriarchal system, all those who are silenced and stigmatized because of their gender identity.

Anyways, I threw a little virtual event on the filmstagram : it's super simple, you only have to use the hashtag #marchdirectedbywomen to join while posting anything (screencaps, reviews, a specific director's focus, reels, videos, or literally whatever) that talks about movies directed by women, during the whole month of march.

I don't mean this as an act of revenge towards the male community (obviously) : some of my favorite directors are men but what I believe is that we aren't given the chance to make up our own minds on whether we could like a certain woman directed film , cause most of the movies directed by women are hidden, less talked of, more difficult to find.

Ask yourself how many female directors you can name just by memory in a minute or so (no cheating!). Now ask yourself how many names of male directors you can recall. I bet it's not very even... And it's not individually our fault, it's a society problem.

What I think isn't that just because a movie was directed by a woman it means it's good, but that we don't see enough of them, that we don't hear enough of female voices and that's not "normal".

I don't always pay attention to the number of films directed by women that I watch in my daily life, obviously we often choose movies because of their content and not necessarily because their director was a woman. So I counted them : out of the 99 films that I watched since September 2021 only 32 were directed by women (and that's a lot compared to most people), among those there were at least 5 short movies and two or three documentaries. Do you see what I mean?

With this event, I really wanted to go against this oppressive and discriminatory "habit" that patriarchy has imposed on us. Cause, unfortunately, unless we dedicate a special space to women's movies, they’re not mentioned, they're not shown, they simply don’t exist. All the space is taken up by men in our society, and sure maybe it is really changing, or maybe they're just pinkwashing their way towards a convenient (for them) version of "equality". Anyhow I still feel today like I always have to fight a little bit harder to get my opinion across, to get my voice heard.

And I know that by creating a separate space where you can watch movies directed by women, we are somehow contributing to the exclusion of women from the "main stage", but what else can we do? We strike, we riot, we scream, but the fight is still going.

Of course I will still watch movies directed by men and I know that march is just a symbolic and very short period of time to change the world, but I truly believe that by pointing out this problem we are making a difference. And maybe someday cinema made by women will take up as much space as men’s cinema or as queer films or as black directors. But until then... we fight. We fight together but also we fight keeping in our minds separate the different perspectives, cause each and every one of them counts and matters and cannot be reduced to "a part of" something else. We fight for a system were there is no more oppression, no more exclusion, no more hierarchy, and enough space for all of us to exist and live "happily ever after".

So yeah... I threw this "event", which is both nothing and a lot, and I hope some of you will read this thinking that they do want to change this system as well, and maybe we could start by watching some of the movies that aren't fed to us by the mainstream all-too-white/male/hetero "spoon".

Thank you for reading, thank you for joining, thank you for being here ♡

p.s. : here's a little instagram guide I made to keep track of who's joining the event and what they're posting, so that we have an archive to draw from, if we're in need!

Also, here are some of the first posts on the hashtag...