It’s been a bad year for diversity in Hollywood, with this year’s Oscars being the whitest in decades, no women being nominated for directing, writing, or cinematography; and with announcements of a new Ghostbusters film prompting backlash against its “all-female cast.” (Funny how when a cast is all-male, it’s just, well, “the cast.”)
In our upcoming issue, Selma director Ava DuVernay – who was infamously snubbed by the Academy this year, and would have been the first Black woman to be nominated for Best Director had she deservedly received a nod – discusses this lack of diversity, saying “That Selma wasn’t nominated is a story, but the bigger story is why it was the only thing close to being in the running – where are the Latino stories? Where are the LGBT stories? Where are the stories of Indigenous people, Native Americans? Where are the stories by and about women? It’s about opening up, it’s about including all kinds of voices – not just in film, but culturally, societally. Hopefully the film will trigger that larger conversation.”
In one small step, the BFI is making a move towards diversity, placing a deliberate focus on elevating the voices of LGBT filmmakers, kick-starting a mentorship scheme to give five LGBT-identified filmmakers a helping hand.
"Much has been written about the industry’s failure to recruit and develop female and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) filmmakers, and rightly so," the BFI said in a statement. "But the plight of LGBT film and filmmakers is less visible, and no less pressing."
"We’ve had a few recent UK success stories: the critical and commercial success of Pride, of course, but also Hong Khaou’s recent BAFTA nomination for Lilting, and Andrew Haigh breaking through to wider global success with HBO’s Looking, after making his mark with UK indie feature Weekend."
Launched by BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival, the nine-month scheme will give five filmmakers the chance to hone their craft within the industry. To apply, filmmakers must be UK-based and have written, produced or directed a film that has screened at BFI Flare or one of BAFTA's qualifying film festivals and have a feature film project in the works. Successful applicants will receive mentoring from a leading figure in the UK film industry, access to industry talks and events and a roundtable with all other mentors and mentees
This push towards presenting more LGBT stories and voices in film also comes in a year where the American ratings board, the MPAA, has shown a prevailing bias against LGBT stories. In our next issue, I review Love Is Strange, Ira Sachs’ romantic drama starring John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as a longterm couple who find their relationship tested by external circumstance following their marriage. The tender, beautifully scored trailer looked emotive and intelligent; treating adult romance with nuance and subtlety. But. But it’s a story about a gay couple, and therefore must be deviant and dangerous and hidden from the children, right?  This is what the MPAA seems to think, as they gave the film – which has no sex scenes or nudity – an R rating. This seems to indicate an underlying homophobia in the MPAA, who apparently fear the effects that seeing a happy gay couple on-screen will have on poor suggestible children. (Here we’d be much more reasonable; RTÉ would just demand the film be shown as a split-screen with a film of a really unhappy couple on one side, in the name of “balance.”)
This double standard won’t come as a surprise to director Kirby Dick, whose documentary This Is An Unrated Film addressed the MPAA’s consistent hypocrisy when it came to rating heterosexual acts and homosexual acts. Kirby shows that films that depict exactly the same sexual acts will be rated differently, with heterosexual sex getting an R rating, while homosexual acts will be slapped with a very restrictive NC-17 rating. For example, when a woman performs oral sex on a man on screen, such as in Single White Female or Swordfish, they are rated as R – however when the oral sex is female on female, like in Where The Truth Lies, the films get an NC-17.
These attitudes, which contribute to the myriad of difficulties and stigmas preventing LGBT stories and characters from being celebrated – hell, just from becoming normalised – are just one of the reasons the BFI’s new scheme is needed, and is an example to be followed.
For more information and submission details for the BFI Flare scheme, click here