Page 138 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 6

CPS1850 Paula Alves de Almeida et al.
Women fared best as producers (26%), followed by executive producers (21%),
editors (21%), writers (16%), directors (8%), and cinematographers (4%).
In Brazil, according to Miranda (1990), in the 1970s and 1980s a strong
increase in national film production, especially as a result of government
incentives, favoured a noteworthy number of women filmmakers began to
work, as demonstrated by Alves (2011). The resumption of Brazilian cinema
after the severe crisis in the 1990s was marked by a strong female presence,
as highlighted by Ottone (2005). In the 2000s, Brazilian audio-visual
production grew again and a substantial number of women made their debut
in the direction of feature films.
The involvement of women in key functions in Brazilian film production,
such as direction, scriptwriting, production, cinematography, protagonism, has
been experiencing impressive growth in the last decades – as demonstrated
by Alves et al. (2017) for the period 1961-2010 – but it appears to have
stabilized in the last 20 years. For this reason, this paper presents an analysis
of women’s participation in film direction and other key functions in the crews
of Brazilian feature films released between 1996 and 2016. It investigates if
there is an association between the sex of film directors and scriptwriters with
the sex of protagonists, cinematographers, producers and other film
characteristics, such as genre.

2. Methodology
We constructed a database for this work, collecting, organizing and
merging information extracted from ANCINE – Agência Nacional do Cinema
(National Cinema Agency), Dicionário de filmes brasileiros: longa-metragem
(Silva Neto, 2009), Dicionário de Cinema Brasileiro (Baladi, 2013), from the fan
websites Filme B, IMDB, AdoroCinema, Academia Brasileira de Cinema and
others, from institutional websites of film production and distribution
companies, cinema festivals catalogues, press kits and trailers, and the films
itself. This database adds information to the one prepared and analysed by
Alves et al. (2017) that included films produced until 2010.
We choose to work with films with length 60 minutes or more. The variables
related to protagonists and film genre was classified by the authors. Sex of the
behind-the-scenes employees was classified as: female, male or both (when
women and men role together the films function). The information about
producers, executive producers and production directors was aggregated into
the category “producers”; documentary, docudrama or semi-documentary
films were classified “documentary”.
In order to estimate the probability of a film being directed by a woman (or
written by a woman, when we considered as response variable the “scriptwriter
is a woman”), we estimated models relating the response variable “director is

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