SUMMARY
This project demonstrated that the redressing of gender inequality in the Italian film industry is moving at a very slow pace, and in fact has remained relatively unchanged in the 21st century, despite the recent shift in popular discourse that implies the opposite. It also revealed the complex role of policy in excluding or including historically minoritised groups such as women and people without access to Italian nationality, both historically (with the Fascist-era “nationality” clauses) and in the present (the gender incentives and fiscal residence clauses of the 2016 Franceschini law). Additionally, the project contributed to the crucial debate around the use of feminist principles when dealing with large amounts of data, including the ethics of collecting information on gender, and the methodological challenges of an inherited system of data collection that relies on the gender binary. CineAF has already become a precious resource for those who are interested in promoting gender equality in the Italian film industry, such as film festival programmers, lobbying associations, lecturers and students, and policy-makers.
DATABASE
The project has generated a participatory database, CENTRICWebi, that includes information on more than 11,000 film titles. CineAF went far beyond its stated ambitions by collecting information not only on film directors as initially envisioned, but on 9 further creative roles and department heads, including producer, screenwriter, editor, director of photography, composer, production designer, costume designer, makeup supervisor, and special effects supervisor. It was decided that such a move beyond the director-centred model for gender equality data was direly needed and very much in line with the project’s feminist and labour-centred principles. The database, which is currently in Beta, was launched in Spring 2022 through a Pilot project including around 200 students of the host institution, who, with the help of Dr. Barotsi and Prof. Fanchi, used it to reflect on gender and other forms of exclusion in the industry, as well as on the use of data itself. Dr. Barotsi and Prof. Fanchi will continue to work with Dr. Matteo Tarantino on the database and its interface beyond the completion of the Action, in order to launch the database publicly.
OBJECTIVES
1. To provide a set of tools that can contribute to reducing the gender gap in Italian film production by creating visibility, awareness, and a change of script that can impact policy and discourse
2. To create a tangible and accessible record of women professionals in Italian film production as a first step towards fostering and multiplying their voices
3. To contribute to complicating and destabilising the mainstream narratives of gender in Italian film production from an intersectional perspective, historically and in the present
4. To create a participatory database that offers an unprecedented understanding of gender inequality in the Italian film industry over the span of over half a century, by collecting information on the production of all feature-length Italian films that received permission for distribution between 1964-2020.
