Are Women Directors Losing Ground?

"The struggle for me was to do something that I really love doing, and finding a way to also raise a family. It's extraordinarily difficult," says Marion Lipschutz, who codirected The Education of Shelby Knox with her production company partner Rose Rosenblatt. Being women and making a movie about a woman's issue was actually helpful to them in the documentary field, they say, because their film is about sex education in Lubbock, Texas, and they knew there were women's groups out there who would fund a project like this.

Heather Rae, who directed the documentary Trudell, about Native American performance artist John Trudell, worked for the Sundance Film Festival for many years, running the Native Forum, which spotlighted films by Native American directors. But even though she thinks the help of a special spotlight like that is useful ‑- "I think women absolutely need it," she says ‑- creating a special section for women is not something she'd advocate. "I've never bought the idea that I should be put someplace because of gender, like a sidebar."

Rae and Lipschutz were joined in the documentary competition by: Jessica Sanders, who won the documentary grand jury prize for After Innocence, a film about inmates who were freed after DNA evidence cleared them; Frauke Sandig, who codirected Frozen Angels, about reproductive technology; and Ellen Perry, who directed The Fall of Fujimori, about Peru's former president Alberto Fujimori.

But the major triumph at Sundance belonged to Rebecca Miller. She was there promoting The Ballad of Jack and Rose as one of the spotlight premieres of the festival. She had been in the festival's competition twice before, first in 1995 with Angela, which won the cinematography and directing awards, and then again with Personal Velocity, which won the cinematography and grand jury prizes in 2002, when there were five other women in the competition.

"It's getting easier for me, because I have more of a track record," Miller says. "It took a long time, but I have no way of measuring how long it would have taken if I had been a man. There's no doubt in my mind that sexism exists in the film world, but it's hard to quantify."

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