Women in Film: ‘Change the numbers, change the game,’ says Rainy Kerwin

Instead of complaining about women being underrepresented in the film business, movie-maker Rainy Kerwin is doing something about it.

“If you change the numbers, you change the game,” the producer-director says when explaining her new platform to alter the industry.

She has created female movie-maker support site Buy Women in reaction to a Variety study which found that of the top 250 grossing films last year, only seven percent were directed by women. Just 11 percent of those films were written by women and only five percent had female cinematographers. That’s despite the fact that 50 percent of film school graduates are female.

The platform encourages audiences to see two films a month that are written or directed by a woman and recommends a list of such movies for all cinematic tastes. It also encourages investment in female films. Since 93 percent of venture capital in the U.S. goes to male-founded companies, it’s little surprise to learn that women have a hard time funding the production, distribution and marketing of their movies.

Rainy says, “Sure you can remortgage your house, syphon off the kid’s college fund and sell a kidney to scrounge up a micro- budget to shoot an indie but where are the marketing dollars coming from? If there are no fat stacks being spent on ad buys, who’s ever going to know about your film?”

She encountered such problems when seeking investors to fund a feature film with three female leads. “‘Women mean nothing in the foreign market and foreign is 60 percent of sales’ was the rhetoric I was getting from the money men,” adds Rainy, who eventually crowdfunded the project, raising $72,000 on Indiegogo, a response which prompted investors to finally jump on board. The film, called “The Wedding Invitation,” is set to open in theaters next April, having won a string of awards this year on the festival circuit.

Working with an all-female crew on the movie encouraged her to start Buy Women, which she describes as “a movement for change.”

She adds, “It’s unfortunate that we need to break it down by gender bias. But when the numbers are so staggeringly low, how can we not?

“There is an audience for female-driven content and female directed films. Yes, we want to put real female characters on the screen. But we also want to make sci-fi and superhero films. A lot of people are surprised to hear a woman wrote ‘E.T.’ or that ‘Wayne’s World’ was directed by a woman.”