To be a woman and work as a director feels...
Exciting.
Ferocious.
Crazy sauce.
Evolving.
A thunderstorm.
Tough.
Heartbreaking.
Demanding.
Grueling.
Very trying.
Climbing the ladder.
Discriminatory.
Very difficult.
Woman are not paranoid, they really are
not represented and don't get work
because they're women.
I feel like I have to work 10 times harder
to prove myself.
What am I doing wrong?
Like, I make films that go to festivals and win awards,
but I'm not getting hired.
You get less offers, then you get less experience,
then you're not hired because of less experience,
so there's all these catch 22s.
Of the 100 top grossing films, 4% are directed by women,
less than 1% by women of color,
and that number hasn't budged in decades.
Because we just keep repeating,
the same stories and the same storytellers.
And even though there's been a lot of
best intentions to diversify the landscape of storytellers,
we haven't been able to do it naturally.
We're trying to hire women, we just can't find them.
There's a lot of talk, but I don't see a lot of action.
There's pockets of support, and I think a lot
of female filmmakers are starting to come together.
There's so many organizations that are helping,
and our hope is that we will all kind of combine
in our forces and get all of us working.
One such organization, is Free the Bid
that has now become Free the Work,
by Alma Har'el, who just directed "Honey Boy".
She's filling your head full of fear,
I'll pump you full of strength.
No, no, no, no, no!
That's amazing.
She's a fantastic champion for women
who she feels have underrepresented voices.
I moved to Los Angeles and right away
started to try and direct music videos.
I guess that was my way in.
♪ Let the seasons begin ♪
♪ Take the big king down ♪
It sort of opened the door to more music videos,
but I was trying to break into commercials
and I couldn't do it.
So I would go to the production company and say,
"How come I'm not doing any commercials?",
and they would just say, "Well, it's just,
"your reel is not strong enough,
"and they're not interested in inviting you to pitch.",
so I went out to the desert in my car with my dog
and a camera that I bought at Best Buy,
and I made this film.
I was in jail for 100 years.
That ended up winning Tribeca
and then opening a lot of opportunities for me.
And when I started to get those commercial offers,
that's when I realized what was happening,
that's when I could see that I'm always
the only woman that's pitching,
and the bigger the campaigns got,
the more I could hear from really big brands
that I thought were leading the way in advertising,
that I'm the first woman they're working with.
So I founded Free the Bid in 2016,
and the idea was to get ad agencies and brands
to take a commitment
that in every triple bid that they make,
one out of the three directors would be a woman.
It should be easy considering
we're one out of two people on Earth,
so it shouldn't be hard to put one out of three.
I've had the opportunity to bid on commercials
because of Free the Bid.
I'm actually on Free the Bid.
The first database,
which was built in my kitchen on my laptop,
had about 70 directors at the time,
and it rippled through the whole industry.
We're in 20 countries around the world,
we work with over 160 ad agencies, over 122 brands.
The increase we've seen in women working
at the highest levels of advertising and brand work
is directly relatable to Free the Bid and the
initiative that Alma and so many that have supported
the initiative have taken.
Yeah, Mozart had a sister.
The crazy part?
She was just as talented.
It was very important for me to take all the things
that I like about using Spotify, and using IMDB,
and using Instagram,
but for underrepresented filmmakers around the world.
It's time to open our eyes.
And what Free the Work is,
which is kind of our evolution of Free the Bid,
is really a global talent discovery
that it is operated by machine learning and algorithms
and intelligent discovery.
Free the Work is a tool and is a way to fight
systemic problems that are keeping women out.
But we're not just fighting for women,
we're also fighting for men of color,
and we're fighting for trans-identifying
and non-binary people.
Our creative and tech team have been a company
named Heat Waves.
They are an all women team of programmers, marketers.
We're doing the work and we're seeing results,
obviously both in the advertising world and in TV and film.
People going to the theaters thirsty,
they're thirsty to see new stories,
they're thirsty to see new people and new faces,
and it's a beautiful time to witness that,
and what we wanna do with Free the Work
is really give them the tools to find that talent.
I wanna be hired and valued
because of the work I do as a director.
I don't wanna be hired and valued
because I'm their one, you know, female director.
If people are, you know, open to women
and people of color right now,
and that's my foot in the door
then I'll take it, because I will be able
to then prove myself once I'm in the door.
Anyone who's been otherized in the past,
we do feel like we're in a moment with real potential.
I mean, these are new worlds, new voices, new stories,
and audiences are responding.
And we haven't had that kind of diversity
in storytelling until now.
It's kind of an illusion sometimes to think
that because popular culture is promoting something,
that really the freedom that women deserve,
both in the workplace and in their personal lives
is already earned and owned.
We have to keep fighting.
Our work is not done,
and none of us are free until all of us are free.