Diversity Is a Trend in the Film Industry. Why It Matters and How It Happened

We live in an era of rapid change. The rapid development of technology, the availability of information, the change of reference points, values. Sometimes these changes we are not prepared for.

Marketers study trends. There are a lot of trends, some are being replaced by others. Now the trend is to play online slot machines in Canada online casino Playamo, and tomorrow it goes into the shade, and something else appears. But there are global trends - megatrends that change the way people live and affect the culture. Megatrends are interconnected with each other and entail changes in the social and economic spheres.

In this article, we will tell you how a trend like Diversity has and will continue to change the world.

Although directors, screenwriters, and producers were mostly men (and still in Hollywood 96% of directors are men), in recent years more and more people in the industry have begun to realize that talent is not the only condition for success, it is experience (and it is very different across gender, ethnic and other groups) and unique stories that matter. We need to open up access to the creative professions to those who were previously underrepresented in them because they know something that middle-class men have no idea about. They weren't, they weren't paying attention, they were filling in the gaps with stereotypes.

This shift has been influenced by research on gender inequality, which began in the 1970s in university settings and is now in the public domain; by the Harvey Weinstein trial, which uncovered the extent of violence against women in Hollywood; and by social media, whose users notice blind spots in the minds of screenwriters. 

There is another factor that has made the West concerned about gender and racial diversity in screenwriting teams. For the first hundred years of its existence, film studios made their money from selling movie tickets (not just them, but still). But in the 21st century, a new way of showing movies has emerged: online platforms that, unlike the plush halls we're used to, can collect information about who's watching their content and how. 

Alas, giants like Netflix do not share even a small part of their data with the press, but they take it into account when giving the green light to new projects. And the policy of inclusion here seems quite pragmatic: Netflix understands that different groups of people will look for different content and need different authors to create it. As much as black actors playing the roles of 19th-century British aristocrats shocked Russian audiences, the series "The Bridgertons" starring the son of an Englishman and a Zimbabwean Rege-Jean Page became a mega-hit and was renewed for a second season.

In Europe, where much of the world's art mainstream is made, cinema is not, as in America, just a commercial enterprise - it is part of a cultural heritage that is supported by the state. Many European countries have passed laws to eradicate various forms of discrimination, which are continued in the regulations of film funds. 

For example, the British Film Institute's standards (very similar to the new Oscar rules, by the way) are based on the unified Equality Act of 2010. In Sweden, where a "feminist government" has been in power for several years, the experiment of equal funding for male and female directors began in the mid-2010s, and in Norway, a gender balance in film crews must be maintained to receive state money. 

There is nothing fundamentally new or restricting the creative potential of such requirements: for example, film foundations have always supported projects that reveal the specificity of their regions and contribute to the preservation of culture and language. Diversity of experience, the opportunity for women or minorities to work in a prestigious industry are as much a part of the state's social policy as the preservation of one's own culture. 

And if in the past it somehow happened by itself that 96% of filmmakers turned out to be men, today, when this situation no longer looks normal, women should be helped to overcome obsolete barriers.

At the same time, a movement to change the curatorial policy of festivals began in Europe. It turned out that the problem was roughly the same as with screenwriters: if the selection committee only includes white middle-class men, they don't see the value in pictures with a different perspective. In the late 2010s, major festivals, including Cannes, signed a Pact for Gender Equality, committing themselves to collect statistics (until you count, you don't understand the scale of the imbalance) and making the cast of curators more diverse.

Today, the global film industry, through systemic measures, is giving a voice to those who previously found it too difficult to get to the microphone. Some time will pass, the imbalance will even out, and we will stop paying attention to the gender winner at Cannes. But for now, in 2021, we still live in a world where the DuCourneau prize seems to be a situation that is exciting and new. In a world where the female gaze is a country that has only recently been discovered and has yet to be explored.