Women in the Italian Film Industry: Against All Odds

Similar to many creative (and other) industries, the film and television industries have for long been permeated by male norms, and by the male worker as the norm. In this context, women workers have always been considered "oddities" – unless they have acted in front of the camera. To a large extent, women have been (and still are) image (Fischer, 1976; Mulvey, 1975). Women's work behind the camera have been counteracted, not least through efforts to exclude them from positions characterized as "creative" or "above-the-line" such as director, producer, and script writer. Further, women have been met with pervading difficulties in allocating finances for their projects and with circumscribed possibilities to have their work screened in the cinema. And although (a few) women are key through their function as "image," films with a woman protagonist are usually provided with a lesser budget than films with a male lead, and women actors get distinctly less paid than their male counterparts (SFI, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2017/08/22/full-list-the-worlds-highest-paid-actors-and-actresses-2017/?sh=2e1c961f3751). Let us give an example of the former: in the Swedish film industry, recently hailed worldwide of being one of the most gender equal screening industries, feature films made between 2013 and 2016 differed in terms of budget depending on the whether the protagonist in a film was male or female. Films with a male lead had on average a 33% higher budget than films with a woman lead. In that same period, women feature film directors had on average a budget ranging between 66% and 86% of the budget of films with a man as director (SFI, 2018). The report published in 2018, by the Swedish Film Institute, concluded that: "[films with women in] key functions generally have overall lower budgets than men" (SFI, 2018, p. 17). Following the international impact that the #Metoo-movement has had and still has, and the recent demands for a 50/50 dispersion between men and women on above-the-line positions in the film industry, gender issues have advanced to the forefront in discussions dealing with the working situation in the film and screen industries. These discussions have appeared in various national contexts in print and social media, as well as in academic work (see, e.g., Jansson et al., 2020; Liddy, 2020; Marghitu, 2018; Meziani & Cabantous, 2020; O'Brien, 2019). It has become obvious that gender inequality pervades all screen industries, large and small, and that women screen workers in different national screen contexts share similar experiences. As film and television production is becoming more and more globalized, with single productions often being the outcome a variety of regional and national industries, finances and competences, working and gendered experiences of being in the industry are also becoming increasingly globalized. Still, there are regional and local differences in how women screen workers experience their work and career situation and these need to be addressed. There are also various aspects of screen work that remain to be tended to academically. Hence, this special section offers a sample of national and local studies that all investigate how gender and equality work is done in four different contexts. It is our hope that this small sample may inspire not only more studies of national contexts, but also inspire to future cross-national studies. Before discussing how various academic fields have engaged with the screening industries in terms of work experience and representation, we wish to point out that film and television, as two available media formats reaching large and heterogeneous audiences, constitute two of the most central expressions of our time, and that both contribute to reflect and mold our understanding of society, of others – and of ourselves (de Lauretis, 1987; Dyer, 1993). Questions about who is allowed to make film and TV and what messages and images are presented and conveyed are thus politically important and imperative. The long-standing male dominance in the industry, together with the realization that images do matter, has sparked an interest in studying gender in the screen industries. The gender conditions in the film industry have attracted scholarly attention across the variety of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, and this special section is a vivid example of this cross-disciplinary scholarship. Three specific, but interrelated fields stand out when it comes to the study of gendered work and inequalities in these industries: production studies, management and life work studies, and studies of women's presence and conditions in screen work. In management studies and work life research, the early 2000s saw an increased interest in focusing and exploring the working conditions in the screening industries, alongside the growing interest for working experiences in what often referred to as the creative industries (see, e.g., Blair, 2001; Delmestri et al., 2005; Ebbers & Wijnberg, 2009; French, 2020; Jones & Pringle, 2015; Meziani & Cabantous, 2020; Soila-Wadman, 2003; Sörensen & Villadsen, 2014). This strand has also included a certain focus on how film can be used as a tool for instruction on how to exert leadership (see, e.g., Bell & Sinclair, 2016). Parallel to this development is the emergence of production studies, emanating from film and television studies. This field explores film and media as cultural practices of media production, and it does so from a variety of perspectives and with various methods. Of particular pertinence here is the sub-field of feminist production studies. This field engages in studying how "routines and rituals […], the economic and political forces […] shape roles, technologies, and the distribution of resources according to cultural and demographic differences" (Mayer et al., 2009, p. 4) in order to understand how "power operates locally through media production to reproduce social hierarchies and inequalities at the level of daily interaction" (Mayer, 2009, p. 15). One of the field's most important contributions here is the critique of the "auteurist" view that films are the "voice" of one single artist, most often the director. Instead, they argue that films are the result of collective work. Departing from this insight, production studies scholars have noted the importance of studying the work that is carried out in the margins, to question the differentiation between "creative" and "craft" professions in film making, and to pay attention to the work done "below-the-line" by workers in the film industry who are seldom credited, but without whose work films would not be produced (see, e.g., Banks, 2009, 2018; Banks et al., 2016; Mayer, 2009, 2011; Mayer et al., 2009). Alongside these two areas of research, there is a third, and more recent, strand that is dedicated to studying women's presence, analyzing policy measures targeting gender (in)equality along with studying impediments to gender equality in the film industry and women's conditions in a male dominated screening industry. This strand of research comes out of feminist media studies as a rather broad field, encompassing both the humanities and the social sciences. While research in both management studies and productions studies constitute important foundations for any research conducted on gender and screen work, for this special section, it is this third strand that is of most relevance, taken that it embraces and explores both local and the global aspects of women's conditions in the male dominated screening industries. Let us therefore shortly present this strand a bit more – and the issues it has raised – in order to give a contextualization of this special section and its four articles. Studies of women's presence in the film industry have mapped the number of women behind the camera, sometimes also including an intersectional analysis and identified gendered budget-gaps and other impediments to gender equality (Cobb, 2020; Lauzen, 2019; Liddy, 2020; Smith et al., 2013). Much of this research is conducted in the United States, discussing the conditions in a film industry that is exclusively driven by private, and most often commercial, stakeholders. In other commercially focused film centers such as Bollywood in India and Nollywood in Nigeria, women behind the screen are reported to be few and the representation of women on screen stereotypical (Mukherjee, 2018; Prakash, 2020; Ukata, 2020). In other contexts, such as Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, where there is public support for film production, gender equality is often proclaimed to be a goal. For instance, the Council of Europe (2017) declared its dedication to gender equality in film production in the so-called Sarajevo-declaration, and according to a mapping carried out by the European Audiovisual Observatory in 2019, 15 EU countries have introduced gender equality measures (EAO, 2019, p. 16). In a recent anthology collecting evidence from a number of countries, media scholar Susan Liddy concludes that while demands for gender equality has been voiced by women in all contexts, public funding institutions range from those being "gender blind… to those who theoretically commit to equality but prevaricate on the best measures to implement change to others who have introduced formal gender policies and intervention strategies" (Liddy, 2020, p. 2). Scholars have pointed to several problems with gender equality policies and reforms in the film sector: they are often vague and without a plan for implementation (Thorsen, 2020), they only reach those who are involved in projects actually funded by public means (Cobb & Williams, 2020), and they lack intersectional intention and reach (Cobb & Williams, 2020; Thorsen, 2020). Further, when reforms are implemented, problems arise because making films include a range of different stakeholders and parties, which are out of reach of government policies (Jansson, 2016), and because the film industry is entrenched with institutionalized norms and values that is difficult to change and which tend to reduce the effects of policies (Jansson, 2017; Jansson & Wallenberg, 2020). Scholars investigating women's conditions in the film industry have for a long time indicated that the way the industry is organized both formally and informally benefits white men. The sexual division of labor in the organization is manifested in women being found on positions such as script supervisors, costume designers, and make-up artists, as well as in various below-the-line positions. Many below-the-line professions are dominated by men, and the female dominated positions such as the ones mentioned above, tend to have lower status (Banks, 2009). Scholars have also noted differences in status among above-the-line professions. For instance, while male directors and scriptwriters are considered to be able to "carry" a movie, women directors and scriptwriters are not considered to do so (Bielby & Bielby, 1996, Eikhof and Cole in this issue). The trope of the male genius has been discussed as a hindrance to gender equality in several studies (see, e.g., Lantz, 2007; Marghitu, 2018; Regev, 2016; Schatz, 1988; and by Jansson et al. in this special section). Studies have also looked into how other features of the way the film industry is organized affects gender and concluded that the outcome of networking differs substantially to the favor of men (Grugulis & Stoyanova, 2012). Moreover, mothering duties limits women's possibilities in an industry where long days and extremely intense periods of work away from home are considered to be the normal procedure (Liddy, 2017; Liddy & O'Brien, 2021; O'Brien, 2015, 2019; Wing-Fai et al., 2015; Wreyford, 2013). Considering all these past (and recent) studies, there is no doubt that the screening industries – as production sites and as workplaces – are of definite interest to scholars within different disciplines. This special section aims at addressing some of the issues that recent scholarship has touched upon and tried to tackle, and it does so from four different national and cultural contexts. At the center of all four articles included in the section is the analysis of women's conditions in the screening industries, including their experiences of working and trying to get by – and of how these industries continue to foster the notion of women film workers as "oddities" in an industry that continues to uphold the idea of the genius as male. Let us now turn to the four articles included in this special section. In our first article, "The price of motherhood in the Irish film and television industries," media scholars Susan Liddy and Anne O'Brien discuss the continuous problems that surround motherhood and screen work, finding in their material evidence that there is a systemic bias against mothers, not only as women, but also as women and mothers, and that mothers have internalized the marginalization that comes from their maternal status. They have also found that many mothers adapted ways that would help them to sustain their working lives, but they were rarely supported in those adaptations by the screen production industry. In "'Almost a European, but not quite': Experiences of Female Employees in the Lithuanian Film Industry from the Postcolonial Point of View," authors Lina Kaminskaite and Jelena Salaj discuss how the women filmmakers experience their conditions in a film industry that is still marked by the transformation of Lithuania from being part of the Soviet union to becoming a country which is a member of the EU. They argue that the Lithuanian film industry is characterized by being in a postcolonial state. While the opening up of Lithuania has meant new possibilities for women film workers, it has also presented difficulties and the negotiation of new identities and new mode of film production. Doris Ruth Eikhof and Amanda Cole focus on how women are considered a risk in film production and how this leads to precarious conditions for women in the industry. In their article named, "On the basis of risk: Screen directors and gender inequality," they use the intersectional risk theory to understand how gender inequality is related to risk management practices in the screen industry. Studying two specific gender equality initiatives in the Canadian film industry, they show how risk management is gendered, and they argue that risk plays an important part in decision making in the industry. By understanding how risk is gendered, they argue, it is possible to change the processes that decides how risk is understood. The last article included in this special section departs from the much-debated aspect of film production, namely the final saying over a film's final format. In "The Final Cut," authors Maria Jansson, Frantzeska Papadopoulou, Ingrid Stigsdotter, and Louise Wallenberg discuss how the relationship between film director and producer serve to reproduce gendered relations that position the male creator and producer as norm – even in contexts where both director and producer are women. Departing from a series of interviews made with mostly women working in these two professions, the authors show how these two above-the-line professions are still governed by the malestream and that they tend to be constructed in relation to masculinity. Clearly, even in a country like Sweden, often hailed for its equality work, the gender equality measures that are undertaken are not sufficient to come to grips with gender inequalities and the male norm. Taken together the four articles shed light on different aspects of the film industry. The evidence provided from the different countries indicate that there are many similarities in the challenges that women in the film industry face. However, there are also differences depending on context. The article about Lithuania shows the importance of situating the film industry in a historical and political context. O'Brian and Liddy show in their article, the importance of understanding the specific context of how child care and the welfare state play out in order to capture women's conditions in film and television work. Eikhof and Cole's article demonstrates the necessity of applying an intersectional approach in order to also see differences in conditions between women, even if they work in the same industry and the same country. The article on Sweden, finally, looks deeper into how specific gender equality policies targeting the film industry plays out, and what problems remain, after having been implemented for almost 20 years. We believe that this special section is one step toward a deeper understanding of how gender shapes the working conditions in the film industry, and hope that it will inspire further research that takes a wider, more inclusive and possibly also more comparative grip on women screen worker's experiences and work conditions. This work was supported by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond under Grant no. P17-0079:1. No conflict of interest has been declared by the authors. The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and/or its supplementary materials.

Taking into account the EU policies aimed to strengthen the industrial-financial condition of its audiovisual system, the Italian broadcasters’ economy and the historical development of its relationship with the national film industry, our study will tackle the Italian free-to-air television policies in national feature films broadcasting. The study analyzes the trends of Italian feature films programming in the national free-to-air television market during the last 10 years, referring to the following issues: a) volume and origin of feature films; b) broadcaster (public and commercial); c) time slots. The results show how Italy has been experiencing a much more dramatic downturn in fiction programming in respect to the other European countries and it discloses that the increase in national TV fiction programming is accompanied by a contraction of domestic feature films slots (despite the good state of health the Italian film industry has been experiencing during the past decade) and an increase of the American ones.

Except for comedy, Italian popular cinema in the postwar era was mainly characterized by ephemeral genres and subgenres that would follow the model of a successful national or foreign movie and then exploit it to the point of complete saturation. A good example is the spaghetti Western, which became extremely popular in the wake of Sergio Leone’s 1964 success Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars), only to disappear within about a decade. One of the main reasons for this phenomenon is the fact that, unlike the Hollywood studio system, the Italian film industry was utterly disorganized, comprising countless short-lived, small production companies with no interest in building up fashionable filmic formulas for long-term use. Thus among successful genres such as the film operistico (opera film), the peplum (sword and sandal), and the giallo (thriller), comedy appears to be the only exception. As old as Italian cinema itself, comedy not only survived every crisis in the movie industry but also became increasingly important, and it is now the only popular form of Italian film (all the other genres disappeared or moved to television). This can be explained by the Italians’ well-known passion for comedy. Long before the birth of film, comedy had a long-standing tradition in Italian theater, going back at least as far as the renowned commedia dell’arte in the sixteenth century, characterized by farce, irreverent parody, mockery, and biting satire.

The Italian film industry and the local banks are progressively shortening the distance between them. The traditional financing options available to producers, presales and coproductions, are now partnering with more sophisticated tools, which have already proven their efficacy in other markets. A new impulse towards these new tools is given by the newly introduced tax incentives, although the local industry still has to grow both in terms of dimension of players and diversified product.

This article draws on a broad range of under-explored historical sources to document the career trajectories of the women who worked in the Italian film industry between 1930 and 1944. Challenging established histories that normalise male dominance in Italian cinema during and after Mussolini's regime, the article sheds light on women's overlooked contribution to Italy's sound film industry and explores the multilayered, shifting dimension of their precarious and gendered labour. Engaging with key questions raised by historians of Italian Fascism and by feminist research in film and media history, the article delineates intersectional barriers to film employment faced by women in the years of the dictatorship and points to their historical legacy.

The yearbooks and almanacs printed between the beginning of the Second World War and the end of the Fifties collect rare and hardly accessible data on the Italian film industry and the professionals involved in it. As such, they are both sources, whose use can be extremely profitable in production studies, and objects of investigation that might reveal the rhetoric and the discursive strategies through which different social actors have promoted an image of that production system as a fully-fledged and rationally organized industry. The article describes these yearbooks and interprets such discourses, in order to better understand the tensions that characterize this phase of important changes for the Italian film production.

This paper examines the evolution and effects of the tax credits systems introduced in the Italian film industry. We have studied the economic and juridical roots of State subsidies, enabling the readers to understand their legitimacy and providing them with the main international best practices. An empirical analysis is performed, assessing whether recent measures introduced in Italy have influenced the domestic theatrical distribution of a sample of 399 Italian films released in the last 4 years. Tax incentives are found to have a positive relation to the number of prints distributed. However, direct contributions do not have a statistical influence on theatrical distribution, supporting the recent wave of reforms aimed at shifting the mix of resources from direct to indirect public support.

The chapter provides an overview of the history of the post-war Italian film industry from crisis to crisis, that is to say from the ground zero of 1945 (when the whole Italian film business had to be politically and economically reorganised, together with the rest of the war-torn country) to the ground zero of 1985 (the year in which, for the first time in almost three decades, Italian film production fell below the rate of 100 films made per year, as the culmination of a crisis that started in the mid-1970s). The chapter opens with an in-depth production history of I vampiri / Lust of the Vampire (Riccardo Freda, 1957), followed by an account of the 1958-1964 boom in the production of pepla, the historical-mythological adventures of the sword-and-sandal kind. Both cases (an isolated commercial failure the former; a short-lived box-office goldmine, or filone, the latter) are emblematic of the functioning of the Italian film industry between the early 1950s and the mid-1980s – a state-subsidised system mostly based on a constellation of medium, small and minuscule business ventures piggy-backing on popular genres/trends in the local and/or global film market.

Music Publishers and Synchronized Scores: Mascagni, Ricordi, and <i>Rapsodia satanica</i>

Reviewed by: Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations by Tami Williams Margaret C. Flinn Tami Williams. Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014. 336pp. Tami Williams’s Germaine Dulac is, as one would guess from its title, an auteur (or more appropriately given the case, auteure!) study. It is also, an exemplary piece of film history—and in spite of its auteur framing, a significant contribution to what one hopes is a burgeoning trend in cinema and media studies of revisionist histories dedicated to the role of women in the film industry. (Williams spends a good deal of time discussing Dulac’s work in the ciné-club movement and film industry beyond her actual directing.) Composed of prose that is clear, logical, and enjoyable to read, this book is essential reading for anyone who has an interest in early French cinema, the Interwar avant-garde, and/or the history of women filmmakers. The book is divided into three parts, each with two chapters, whose titles are fairly self-explanatory: 1. “ ‘How I Became a film Director’: Dulac’s early Life and Pre-Filmmaking Career”; 2. “The Great War and Dulac’s First Films”; 3. “Negotiating Art and Industry in the Postwar Context”; 4. “Dulac’s Aesthetic Matures”; 5. “Fiction, Newsreels, and Social Documentary”; 6. “Popular Front Activism and Vichy.” A full third of the book is dedicated to back matter, not only extensive endnotes and bibliography (including a helpfully isolated list of Dulac’s own publications), but an extremely useful chronology and detailed filmography. The book is a straightforward and fairly quick read, and therefore lends itself well as a case study for a film history methods course, for either undergraduate or graduate students, where cover-to-cover reading of an entire study is beneficial. In this auteur study dedicated to refining the reductionist reputation of an exceptional woman filmmaker and engaged feminist intellectual, a great deal of time is spent elaborating on what constitutes Dulac’s vision (as film theorist and industry leader) and her aesthetic (as a filmmaker). According to Williams, Dulac’s films all bear evidence of a productive dichotomy and [End Page 311] stylistic dualism made up of realist and symbolist tendencies, while her broader vision for film and society is consistently anchored in the belief that film has an integrated social mission and always involves artistic, pedagogical, and commercial concerns. Throughout the book, Williams uses Dulac’s correspondence to shed light on less known or discussed aspects of Dulac’s personal life, including her personal and professional partnerships with Albert Dulac, actress Stasia de Napierkowska, writer Irène Hillel-Erlanger, and filmmaker Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville. The early chapters (dealing with the period before Dulac began making films and the early years whose films are for the most part lost) lean especially heavily on such documentation, as well as on Dulac’s published articles—mostly theater criticism in the feminist press. Her Catholic upbringing/formation and her longstanding passion for music (and how the latter manifests itself both in Dulac’s filmmaking and film theoretical writings) are also detailed. Williams’s analyses of Dulac’s characters and plot structures excavate the ways in which Dulac elaborated both explicitly and implicitly feminist representations of women’s lives, even in the face of relatively socially conservative eras (such as the pronatalist post-WWI years, when women were returned to a more limited domestic sphere after maintaining the home front’s workforce during the war). The reconstructive descriptions of lost films as well as the accounts of films unavailable to the average viewer today furnish specialist and early-film buff alike with a much more complete picture of Dulac’s filmmaking than has been available to date. The book’s central chapters include the most extensive analysis of films, both individually and in thematic groupings. Besides the central paradigm of mixed realism and symbolism, which Williams shows to apply to all of Dulac’s filmmaking, she includes thematic discussions of the use of dance, gesture, sport, music, and abstraction. Here a reader’s understanding of Dulac’s two most famous and familiar films, La Souriante Madame Beaudet (1923) and La Coquille et...

The aim of this article is to highlight the peculiar status of the adapter and dubbing director in the Italian film industry. For reasons partly to do with the historical development of the dubbing film industry in Italy, adapters—who may or may not also be the actual translators of the films, but who are here considered as distinct professional figures—have always enjoyed a great deal of freedom and have been able to express their creative skills. This paper focuses on the translation process of Woody Allen's films into Italian, taken here as an extreme example of both manipulative and effectively creative practices in film translation.1

Most studies indicate Hollywood's economic and financial leadership in the movie markets from the 1910s onward. There is a shortfall in the literature concerning the analysis of the efficacy of other minor film industries. This article examines the Italian film industry in the 1990s and beginning of the twenty‐first century. The research suggests that the Italian film industry is very risky and unpredictable, but while the extreme uncertainty surrounding the business is offset by the considerable economic success that Hollywood movies achieve at the box office, as indicated by previous literature contributions, a different business scenario emerges in Italy. The value of this article is first represented by the data used—provided by the Osservatorio of Cinecittà—which is unique and has not been published before. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This article examines the impact of structural changes in the postwar film industry on the activities and effectiveness of the foreign distribution subsidiaries of American firms. As these subsidiaries saw their regular supply of films from their in-house Hollywood studios decline, they sought out alternative sources of product content, often from local markets. Unable to rely on the traditional “ownership” advantages bestowed on them by their parent firms, these subsidiaries increasingly needed to integrate into local networks and forge closer relationships with local producers and exhibitors. Our focus is on Italy, one of the most important film markets for US companies in the 1960s. We collect data on the box office revenues and screen time allocated to every film released into the first-run cinema market and compare the effectiveness of American versus Italian distributors in maximizing the exposure of their most popular films. We explore the attempts by US firms to form partnerships with Italian distributors and producers. Finally, we examine available archival records to reveal the detailed activities of US distribution offices in Italy and their attempts to integrate into local business networks. We conclude that while US subsidiaries did not fully succeed in becoming “insiders” within the Italian film industry in this period, they did actively work toward such an objective.

From a historiographical point of view, the Italian diva Eleonora Duse (1858–1924) as an actress-manager offers an original case study in relation to her only film performance in Cenere ( Ashes, 1916). This is a film adapted from the eponymous novel by Grazia Deledda (Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926). In the 1910s, when Duse decided to work in the Italian film industry, she was a celebrity and her name was a guarantee of success for the Ambrosio Company in Turin. The film producers wanted to use her celebrity in order to ensure success at the box office. As an actress-manager with a long and acclaimed international career in the theatre, Duse knew this mechanism very well, but her position was contrary to their expectations. In fact, she aimed to present herself as an anti-diva, with her wrinkle-furrowed face and white hair, proposing a fascinating artistic creation based on the ‘mother roles’ that she had created for the theatre. This paper explores new elements concerning the position of Duse as an actress-manager for the Italian film industry in the 1910s. It is focused on her strategy of reiterating her stage success in playing a mother. On film, she did not want to be an instrument used for commercial purposes, and she did not want to create a common popular diva film. With Cenere, Duse's capability as an actress-manager can be seen in her creation of this non-conventional, poetic role for the silent film industry in wartime Italy.

In the aftermath of the MeToo movement, during an ongoing pandemic, and in the midst of repeated demands for a 50/50 split between men and women in above-the-line positions, this book analyzes and interrogates the politics of gender focusing on the Swedish film industry, often considered to be the most "gender equal" film industry worldwide. While this gender equality (with a considerable proportion of women behind the camera) is much due to policies carried out by the state-funded Swedish Film Institute, women filmmakers in Sweden still struggle with the same problems as do women in other national film industries. These problems entail having smaller production and distribution budgets than men and working in an environment involving recurring scandals of gender discrimination and sexual harassment. This open access book looks behind the statistics and explores the often complex cultural, legal, and political conditions under which women have entered a male-dominated industry and discusses women’s strategies and efforts to promote change while providing evidence on how women’s presence has challenged the industry by provoking critical reactions and introducing new ways to portray women on screen. Using a wide range of different sources (e.g. archival material, laws, contracts, films, biographical materials, and interviews), the book tells the history of the rise of gender equality efforts undertaken by the Swedish Film Institute and investigates women’s possibilities to manage the rights to their work. It offers compelling portraits of pioneering women who have worked in or in relation to the industry and looks at the experiences of women currently working in the film industry.