Gender Barriers: Group Empowers Female Filmmakers

As part of efforts to break gender barriers and promote the rights of girls and women in the movie industry, a nongovernmental organisation, the Girls Voices Initiative, with support from the French Embassy, is empowering female film makers in Nigeria.

Speaking during the networking event and launch of its project, Girl Nation, in Abuja, the founder and creative director of Girls Voices Initiative, Carolyn Seaman, said the Girl Nation Programme is designed to target female film makers to build large community of female film makers.

She said, “We feel  that women in the film industry have been disadvantaged for far too long. We have been relegated to only strive as film makers or at best, actresses or as caterers, cooking food on set or more recently as production managers because we manage the money well.

“Women can also begin to take those critical aspect like holding the camera, lightening the set or creating the design of various set production. We are hoping that with the programme, Girl Nation,  which we are launching today, is hopefully going to close that gap.

“Of course we recognised that this gap is not only peculiar to Nigeria, even Hollywood Is struggling with gender inequality in their film industry. For us, we are also taking proactive steps to close the gaps.”

She said there will be a short film production at the end of the engagement with the film makers, hoping that they will be able to stream around the world and they will be able to enter them in film festivals and hopefully African stories can go far and wide to create challenges in different aspects.

On funding for the project, she said the organisation have received a lot of support from the French Embassy to power the project.

The French Embassy representative, Rafael Pont, said the promotion of girls and women’s rights is one of the priorities of the French Government.