by Beth Pinsker, Senior Producer (see more from this contributor)

PARK CITY, UT -- The Sundance Film Festival has been the chief launching pad for talented women directors since Robert Redford took it over more than 20 years ago, and showing a film there is one of the few ways to break through the gender politics that plague the industry. Karyn Kusama, for one, got her start in 2000 when Girlfight won the grand jury prize, and there were five other women directors with her out of the 16 competing, one of the best showings by women in that category. Now she's directing the big-budget Aeon Flux, starring Charlize Theron, which is due out later in 2005.


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    See Miranda July and Georgina Garcia Riedel in action at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival in our exclusive video as they talk about their films and the challenge of being the only two women directors in this year's dramatic film competition.

But this year, the same competition that has launched the careers of more than 20 women in the last five years had only two new additions. And on the documentary side, where women sometimes make up more than half of the slate, there were only five women included among the 16 films. This mirrors the state of the industry overall, where women directors account for only about 11 percent of the films released, with that number slipping all the time.

On their own

The two women in the dramatic competition felt kind of lonely.

Miranda July, a 28-year-old experimental artist, won a special award for "originality of vision" for Me and You and Everyone We Know, in which she plays an experimental artist very much like herself. It will be released by IFC Films later this year.

"It's kind of sobering," July says, sitting by an indoor pool at the festival's headquarters. "It makes you think back on the whole experience of making a movie, and you think, Maybe the people on my crew never worked with a woman director. Given the odds, probably not."

How did that translate into getting the project done? It meant it almost didn't happen. "I'm a woman, I didn't want to have any stars, I wanted to be in it myself and I wanted to do everything my own way. There was definitely a reaction to that. Most people didn't want to have anything to do with it," July says.

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