BREAK THE FRAME

Interviews with more than two dozen female filmmakers from a wide range of genres.

In 2017, a report by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that “every major Hollywood studio systematically discriminated against hiring female directors,” even though “the graduating classes of America’s top film schools are 50/50 male/female.” Moreover, Smokler was surprised to discover that “articulate, well-heeled, filmgoing friends” were uninformed about women’s contributions to cinema, such as not knowing that Greta Gerwig was an accomplished director well before Barbie. In this entertaining corrective, Smokler, a writer and documentary filmmaker, interviewed 25 writers, producers, and directors—all of them Americans who “have at least one film or television series a reasonably avid movie watcher would have heard of or seen”—and asked them “to focus on the stories of their triumphs that we can all learn from and share.” Among the participants are Barbara Kopple, “the Mother Courage of American documentary filmmaking”; Julie Dash, “the first black woman to direct a feature film in general release in America”; and Chris Hegedus, whose enormous contributions to documentaries would “raise the level of innovation in nonfiction cinema that had already seemed to be at its apex.” As is often the case with books like this one, some interviews are more insightful than others. For the most part, the exceptional talent interviewed here provide valuable perspectives on the art of filmmaking. There are many amusing anecdotes, as when Jessica Yu, director of the short subject Breathing Lessons, a documentary about a polio-stricken man who lived his life in an iron lung, says the biggest change in her life after she won her Oscar was that “I gained a bit of professional identity from doing that and your family stops asking ‘what is it exactly that you do?’”

A welcome spotlight on the considerable achievements of female filmmakers.