Cinema Femme is meant to go beyond our digital pages. We are a movement. The Cinema Femme movement will support more female and diverse representation in film criticism, resulting in more female directed and diverse films being recognized for their value. These reviews will attract more movie goers and interested backers to financially support these films. We will do this by having top female critics writing personal essays about the issue’s film focus, and interviews with female film critics and female filmmakers.
It’s glaringly clear that there is a lack of balance when it comes to diversity in film making and film criticism. We see this through Rotten Tomatoes. The past year they have been stepping up their game and increasing the percentage of female and diverse critics since this report came out in 2017. But if you google a film you’re interested in seeing that came out before 2018, I recommend you looking at the critics who vote on the percentage before you make a decision in seeing a film. For example, google The Zookeeper’s Wife directed by Niki Caro (North Country, Whale Rider) and you see the first page of critics on the Rotten Tomatoes site are all white men and there are no female or diverse critics that are represented. Pamela Powell and I discuss this in our interview for the inaugural issue. Pamela was recently accepted as a Rotten Tomatoes critic, which is great to hear!
To combat the lack of balance in Rotten Tomatoes a new site is coming soon called CherryPicks. This site is exclusively for film criticism by women. Stay tuned and subscribe here: https://www.thecherrypicks.com/
