Break the frame Conversations with women filmmakers

Author and journalist Smokler (Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to '80s Teen Movies) sits down for 24 interviews with women directors, from Barbara Kopple and Cheryl Dunne to Alice Wu and Erin Lee Carr. As an interviewer, Smokler projects genuine enthusiasm for championing women directors and their art, giving equal weight to feature and independent films, television episodes and series, documentaries, and music videos as works that can make statements, launch careers, or influence the broader culture. While these interviews give space for each director to discuss career struggles and the entrenched inequalities of the film industry, the conversations focus on and return to specific works, experiences, filmmaking approaches, and inspirations, an approach that highlights these directors' successes in spite of the odds against them. VERDICT A strong choice for any film collection. Smokler and his interviewees demonstrate just how profound an impact women directors have had on the cultural landscape, and readers who pick this up to dip into a discussion with a favorite director will likely walk away with new creators and works to explore.--Kathleen McCallister

Interviews with more than two dozen female filmmakers from a wide range of genres. In 2017, a report by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that "every major Hollywood studio systematically discriminated against hiring female directors," even though "the graduating classes of America's top film schools are 50/50 male/female." Moreover, Smokler was surprised to discover that "articulate, well-heeled, filmgoing friends" were uninformed about women's contributions to cinema, such as not knowing that Greta Gerwig was an accomplished director well beforeBarbie. In this entertaining corrective, Smokler, a writer and documentary filmmaker, interviewed 25 writers, producers, and directors--all of them Americans who "have at least one film or television series a reasonably avid movie watcher would have heard of or seen"--and asked them "to focus on the stories of their triumphs that we can all learn from and share." Among the participants are Barbara Kopple, "the Mother Courage of American documentary filmmaking"; Julie Dash, "the first black woman to direct a feature film in general release in America"; and Chris Hegedus, whose enormous contributions to documentaries would "raise the level of innovation in nonfiction cinema that had already seemed to be at its apex." As is often the case with books like this one, some interviews are more insightful than others. For the most part, the exceptional talent interviewed here provide valuable perspectives on the art of filmmaking. There are many amusing anecdotes, as when Jessica Yu, director of the short subjectBreathing Lessons, a documentary about a polio-stricken man who lived his life in an iron lung, says the biggest change in her life after she won her Oscar was that "I gained a bit of professional identity from doing that and your family stops asking 'what is it exactly that you do?'" A welcome spotlight on the considerable achievements of female filmmakers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.