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.

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.

Twenty-seven-year-old Georgina Garcia Riedel's How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer is less autobiographical and experimental, but since it's a gentle story about three generations of strong-willed women trying to find love in a small town, it's still a hard sell. Even with stars Elizabeth Pena and America Ferrera, it has yet to find a distribution deal.

"I just want to get it out to theaters," says Riedel, who thought the number of women at the festival this year was "sad." She made it this far by bypassing the system altogether. "I'm female, young, with only one short ‑- I wasn't naive enough to think if I shopped around my script it would happen. A couple of agents and managers read it, but nobody was clamoring for it. I took it to people who would love the script, who love me and who would give me money: my family." Her parents put up the initial budget, expecting her to get finishing funds from other sources, but then she couldn't get those either, so they put up the total cost.

Ferrera, who made a splash at the festival two years ago with Real Women Have Curves, directed by Patricia Cardozo, has now worked with three women directors, including Catherine Hardwicke (who won the director's award in 2003 for Thirteen) on the upcoming Heath Ledger vehicle The Lords of Dogtown.

"It's a wonderful experience to see people of my own species being successful and having opportunities," she says. "In working with women, their styles are just as different as any male directors."

For the documentary filmmakers, the barriers to entry are also getting taller instead of going away, because funding is tighter and there's more pressure to be commercially successful ‑- which puts the playing field at the same split level that it is for dramatic filmmakers.

"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."

See more of iVillage's exclusive Sundance coverage: Check out our Sunny Sundance Stars in the Spotlight.