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PARK CITY — As the 2019 Sundance Film Festival gets underway, the message has been clear: Festival organizers set out to make this year’s event as diverse as possible.
At the festival’s opening day kickoff on Thursday in Park City, Sundance Institute Executive Director Keri Putnam said the organizers realized they had a diversity “blind spot” in certain aspects of the yearly festival.
So the Sundance Institute commissioned a study in coordination with the University of Southern California-Annenberg Inclusion Initiative to examine where they could make up that gap.
The study, released Friday, shows that the percentage of projects accepted at Sundance that were made by at least one woman more than doubled from 2009 to 2018, but still lags below 50 percent.
“This study shows us where the pipeline for women and people of color is robust and where more support is needed,” USC-Annenberg Professor Stacy L. Smith, who helped compile the study, said in a news release. “The gains we saw for women over the past decade reveal that change is possible and where more support is needed.”
The percentage of dramatic film submissions made by women selected at Sundance went from 17 percent in 2009 to 37 percent in 2018, according to the study. That’s still less than the percent of festival submissions that were made by white men, which was at just under 42 percent in 2017 and 2018, according to the study.
Smith discussed the findings of the study Friday at a panel in Park City moderated by producer Franklin Leonard. The panel also featured producer Nina Jacobson, director Angela Robinson and Sundance Institute’s Director of Outreach and Inclusion Karim Ahmad.
Smith closed the panel by issuing a challenge to everyone the film community: Commit to working with a female director sometime within the next 18 months.
“We can dramatically change the pipeline by producers and people amplifying this director challenge,” Smith said at the panel. “We need everyone who writes checks in independent film to say that they will work with a feature film director that’s a female… in the next 18 months. Go!”
The gains we saw for women over the past decade reveal that change is possible and where more support is needed.
–Stacy L. Smith, professor at USC-Annenberg
All the panelists agreed to take up the challenge. Smith said producer and director Paul Feig and actress Amy Schumer have also agreed.
Just under 28 percent of feature films selected for Sundance across 2017-2018 had at least one director of color, according to the study.
Robinson, a black woman, said she still experiences discrimination in Hollywood today. There’s a different standard in the industry for people of color, she said.
“You have to punch above your weight, you have to be more prepared,” Robinson said. “There is nothing in this entire process that prepares people for the buzzsaw that is this industry”
Emerging out of a @TIMESUPNOW meeting and announced today at #Sundance, the 4% Challenge aims to increase the number of women directing top movies. @ninajacobson#therealbradsimpson@paulfeig@franklinleonard@RobinsonAngela & @amyschumer have all signed on. Will you? pic.twitter.com/7TTAgtn6N8
— Annenberg Inclusion Initiative (@Inclusionists) January 25, 2019
Though the data reveals there is some inclusion work yet to be done, the study did find that Sundance short film selections more closely mirror the demographics of the U.S. population.
The percentage of films selected that were made by at least one woman or person of color was at 45.5 percent across 2017-2018, according to the study.
“It’s clear from this data that there is a robust and exciting talent pool including women and people of color,” Putnam said in the news release. “We are proud of the investments the Institute has made in identifying and supporting underrepresented artists, and we are even prouder of the results those investments have catalyzed, over the two years captured here.”
Find the full USC-Annenberg study by clicking this link.
Stay with KSL.com for continuing coverage from the Sundance Film Festival, from now until February 3.
