INTERVIEW: 51Fest celebrates voices, stories of the female majority
Photo: After the Wedding, a selection at 51Fest, stars, from left, Michelle Williams and Julianne Moore. Photo courtesy of Julio Macat / ASC / Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics with permission.
51Fest, which celebrates the stories and contributions of women, is the new film festival from Tina Brown’s Women in the World and IFC Center. The name of the initiative is meant to remind audience members of the female majority (51 percent) and the many artistic voices on the cinematic scene.
“It’s a partnership between Women in the World, Tina Brown’s organization, and the IFC Center, the idea being to create an event that tells women’s stories and gives a platform for an elevated conversation after the programming,” said Anne Hubbell, 51Fest program director. “It’s sort of part film festival, part Women in the World summit, and it was an idea that I think Tina really wanted to do something that was outside the world of the summit that was a little more long form in storytelling.”
There are many interesting programs throughout the festival, which runs July 18-21 at the SVA Theatre and IFC Center in New York City. The opening night film is Kathy Griffin: A Hell of a Story, which details the comedian’s troubled times after she posed with a bloodied mask of President Donald Trump. Griffin will be in conversation with Brown after the screening.
Another highlight is the screening of After the Wedding, starring Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams, with Moore in attendance afterward. Otherhood, starring Angela Bassett, Patricia Arquette and Felicity Huffman, will also play 51Fest, ditto for the documentary Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins.
“The subtitle of the festival is the ‘Female Majority on Screen’ because women make up 51 percent of the population, and yet when you see the number of directors every year or the number of lead roles for women, there’s not equity there,” Hubbell said. “This is to address that to some extent but also to just really highlight diverse stories from diverse women, so we really wanted to do our best to include women of all kinds — from lots of different places, economic situations, backgrounds. And so I think we have a really diverse lineup of stories to tell. Some of them are documentaries, and some of them are narrative stories. I think you can get something out of each of the movies, and the conversations afterward, they won’t be intentionally intense or complicated. But I do think that they’ll look at various things.”
It was important for Hubbell and the team to build a festival that was representational. They put out many feelers to see what film companies might be interested and what movies might be available, and they received many responses from several distributors. Their efforts have paid off with a full slate of programming, featuring everything from Brittany Runs a Marathon to For Sama.
For Hubbell, one of the hallmark events is Friday evening’s Women in the World Spotlight. Brown will interview Cecile Richards and Ai-jen Poo, co-founders with Alicia Garza, of Supermajority, a new activist organization that provides tools and resources to women.
“That’s really exciting for us,” she said. “We kind of decided that we wanted to have women telling their stories, whether they were in the political arena or they were on television, and so this is a new organization that Ai-jen Poo and Cecile Richards have put together. And they’ll both be there in conversation with Tina to talk about their stories of activism and how they are making change and what women can do to be inspiring, and probably [they’ll] tell some stories we don’t want to hear but will help us to take action. And I think given the political climate, this is one of the programs I’m looking most forward to.”
Another highlight for Hubbell is the Griffin documentary. The program director believes that the comedian is often misunderstood and many people might not know the full gravity of what happened in the aftermath of that infamous photo’s release.
“This is something actually that Tina Brown felt very strongly about, opening with Kathy’s story,” Hubbell said. “The movie is very powerful. People tend to have an opinion of Kathy Griffin. If you know who she is, then you probably have an opinion of her, and so regardless of whether you think she is funny and wonderful, or maybe you don’t think that, this story of what happened to her is really also the story of what could happen to anybody who speaks out and exercises their First-Amendment rights and has the government come down on them in a very harsh way. So after she posted the photograph of her holding a mask of Donald Trump, she was under federal investigation, and her phones were tapped. She lost her job, and she, like so many women, was resilient enough to take that adversity and make it her own story.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
51Fest runs July 18-21 at the SVA Theatre and IFC Center in New York City. The festival is a partnership of Tina Brown’s Women in the World and IFC Center. Click here for more information and tickets.
