Marking International Women’s Day, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) announced that it has achieved its gender-parity goals for the number of productions directed by women and for production budgets allocated to women, three years after making its initial commitment.
2018–2019 results*:
- 48% of NFB works were directed by women (38% by men and 14% by mixed teams)
- 44% of the NFB production budget was allocated to works created by women (41% for works by men and 15% for works by mixed teams)
Among the worthy women-lead animation projects produced by the NFB in recent years are 2019 Oscar nominated short Animal Behaviour (Alison Snowden & David Fine), multi-award winner Hedgehog’s Home (Eva Cvijanović), Threads (Torill Kove) and Étreintes (Justine Vuylsteker), as well as VR works Museum of Symmetry by Paloma Dawkins and Biidaaban: First Light by Lisa Jackson.
“We are proud of this commitment, of our results, and above all of having kickstarted an industry-wide movement that must continue until parity becomes business as usual. Creating parity also means working toward diversity and inclusion, because women creators come from a variety of backgrounds and places. And indeed, in 2018–2019, 65% of NFB works by Indigenous artists were directed by women, and 58% of NFB works by artists from diverse ethnocultural backgrounds were directed by women,” commented Claude Joli-Coeur, Government Film Commissioner and Chairperson of the NFB.
In 2016, the NFB made a formal commitment to ensure that by 2019, half of its productions would be directed by women and half of production spending would be allocated to projects directed by women. In 2017, the NFB added new objectives for parity by 2020 in key creative positions — including screenwriting, editing, cinematography, and music composition. The results for these objectives will be unveiled in June 2019.
*Preliminary data as of March 4, 2019, several weeks before the end of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2019.
