Film funding discrimination takes hold long before a movie reaches a festival lineup, Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat said at a Tokyo International Film Festival talk Nov. 1. Serbian director Jelena Maksimović joined her for the session, which was meant to explore women and feminism on screen but kept coming back to money, Variety reported.
“The discrimination did not start at the festival, but it started at the development level,” Sadat said.
Film scholar Takasaki Ikuko moderated the talk, titled “The Future of Women’s Cinema,” at the TIFF Lounge in Tokyo Midtown Hibiya. Both guests came with films that had already drawn attention this year. Sadat’s movie “No Good Men” opened the Berlin International Film Festival in February. Maksimović’s fiction debut, “Until the Day Ends,” is set against Serbia’s student protests. It premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti section, then competed in Tokyo and won Best Artistic Contribution.
‘The discrimination is fundamental’
Both directors said getting a film financed often demands some degree of conformity. In Afghanistan, Sadat said, that means dealing with a closed circle.
“There is this cultural mafia, a bunch of old men, and you as a woman, you never can get in,” she said. Even a slim chance at the same privileges takes capitulation, submission and compromise, she added.
“It’s either that to get into this network [or] community of cinema, or like what I did, get connected to another system. In my case, it was European filmmaking,” Sadat said.
Europe has its own problems, though. Sadat compared its funds to the situation at home. “Filmmaking in Afghanistan is a crime — it’s not as extreme as that — but the discrimination is fundamental, it’s in the system,” she said.
She said the funding gap between men and women is “treated so normally.”
Maksimović on Yugoslavia and Serbia’s film center
Maksimović traced the imbalance back to Yugoslavia. “It was also like that back in Yugoslavia,” she said, “even though it was a very progressive country there were a lot more male directors […] but things started changing in the Balkans after the Yugoslav Wars… not because of that, but because we moved into more progressive times.”
Her more urgent concern was money at home. She said Film Center Serbia “worked decently” for a few years until the outgoing government cut off its funding entirely to punish filmmakers for backing student-led anti-corruption protests.
Serbian film associations made a similar complaint in February, accusing the center of freezing public funding calls for more than 14 months as part of “state-sponsored censorship.” The center rejected those claims, saying it held off on new calls because 53 projects that received about €13 million had not been completed or would not be filmed.
The protest movement began after a deadly 2024 train station canopy collapse in Novi Sad. Its Student List won an outright majority in Serbia’s snap parliamentary election Oct. 25, ending the Serbian Progressive Party’s 14 years in power.
“Luckily, a few days ago the students won. We’re very happy at the moment, but there’s a huge fight in front of us,” Maksimović said. The damage left behind won’t be fixed quickly, she added.
Money was tight even before the freeze. “Even when the film center worked normally we had a difficult time financing our films, the amount of money for Serbian films is very small and it’s hard to find co-production countries,” she said.
She also said Serbia’s male directors have had advantages their female peers haven’t. Directors working outside the mainstream look out for one another, Maksimović said, but that community is also a “certain kind of bubble,” far removed from what she called “big funding.”
“We didn’t dare to apply to the big funding to get more money for our films because we knew we wouldn’t get the money there,” she said.
She hopes the election gives the system a chance at an overhaul. “I’m very proud that I’m coming from Serbia today because students really showed us that it’s possible,” she said.
A jury member’s view of Venice
Near the end of the talk, an audience member asked how to get real change instead of lip service, noting there were “only about four films in the selection made by women” in Tokyo.
Sadat answered with what she saw as a Venice jury member. May el-Toukhy’s “Woman Unknown,” which won the Golden Lion, was the only film solely directed by a woman in the 21-title competition. Rachel Szor co-directed the documentary “NAZA,” a late addition.
“I was part of the Venice Film Festival this year in the main competition, and I was very surprised. I don’t want to comment on any specific film, but there were films that were just bad, but they are made by male directors. But women directors are not allowed to make bad [films],” she said.
Sadat recalled Venice’s director saying the films women make are “not good enough for competition.” Artistic director Alberto Barbera told Variety in July that the film was “the only one we found of adequate quality to compete internationally.”
Filmmakers are human and need room to experiment, Sadat said, yet women get punished for anything short of perfection.
Maksimović wants the fix to start higher up. “We have to change the systems — start with the fundings, the committees,” she said. She doesn’t want her films viewed in a tokenistic way, either.
“I know people are trying to change things, but are they really changing? Or are they just putting things into boxes?” she said.
Sadat took a smaller view when asked about the future. “Coming from a war country, and in our country, people are absolutely in survival mode. We do not think of the future; we think about the present. Change can start from little things,” she said.
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