Women and Hollywood

Melissa Silverstein is the founder and editor of Women and Hollywood, one of the most respected sites for issues related to women and film as well as other areas of pop culture. Women and Hollywood educates, advocates, and agitates for gender parity across the entertainment industry.

She is also the co-founder and Artistic Director of The Athena Film Festival. The 4th annual festival will take place from February 6-9, 2014 at Barnard College in NYC.

Melissa recently published the first book from Women and Hollywood, In Her Voice: Women Directors Talk Directing, which is a compilation of over 40 interviews that have appeared on the site.

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Blog Roll

Interview with Susan Youssef, Director of Habibi

Features

Susan Youssef's film Habibi played at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

By Melissa Silverstein
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June 21, 2012 1:17 PM
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0 Comments

Blogs

Mary Harron's The Moth Diaries hits theatres this week. It is also available on demand.

By Melissa Silverstein
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April 18, 2012 11:45 AM
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3 Comments

Blogs

Amy Heckerling has made some serious classic films in her career namely Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless. She was in NY this past weekend screening Clueless and her new film Vamps at the Lena Dunham curated program at BAM, Hey Girlfriend. Vamps is about vampires living in contemporary NYC starring Alicia Silverstone and Krysten Ritter.

By Melissa Silverstein
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April 9, 2012 12:16 PM
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0 Comments

Blogs

Susan Seidelman returns to the big screen with the Musical Chairs a love story set in the world of wheelchair ballroom dancing. It's got something for everyone. It's got class issues, gender issues, issues reated to disability, race issues all wrapped up in a deeply felt star crossed love story.

By Melissa Silverstein
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March 23, 2012 12:11 PM
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2 Comments

Blogs

Nina Jacobson is poised to have a really great weekend. She's about to open The Hunger Games which if tracking and advance sales hold will be one of the best opening weekends ever. She answered some questions by phone as the film gets ready to roll out

By Melissa Silverstein
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March 22, 2012 11:37 AM
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5 Comments

Video

Amy Ziering is the producer of 'The Invisible War' directed by Kirby Dick and winner of the Sundance 2012 Documentary Audience Award.

By Therese Shechter
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January 31, 2012 11:24 AM
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2 Comments

Video

Valérie Donzelli has made a heartbreaking film about the fight a couple goes through to save their son from a brain tumor. They declare war on the cancer and with the support of their family their become singlemindely focused on saving him. This story parallels the actual true life story of director, star and co-writer Donzelli. She and her former partner Jérémie Elkaïm (who co-stars in the film and wrote the script with her) went through a lot of what Romeo and Juliette (yes, that's their names in the movie) go through in order to save their son.

By Melissa Silverstein
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January 27, 2012 11:15 AM
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1 Comment

Donald MacLellan

Women and Hollywood: This is a very different biopic of a leader because it is of a female leader. What about this films makes it different in terms of leadership?

Phyllida Lloyd: First of all it's not a biopic. It's all told from her point of view. We're experiencing how did it feel to be there not objectively, but how did it feel to be the first female leader of the western world coming from a very lower class background coming into this world of privileged, entitled men. It's how does it feel to walk into a room of men who all fought in the Second World War to be the person who is in fact in charge of a war knowing that all the men are looking at you. Of course she's not had any experience with this so we're trying to put ourselves in her shoes using our own experience of the workplace.

WaH: I read that you said that this movie could only have been made by a female team.

PL: Not that it could only have been made by women but I think it is a personal project for all three of us. The kinds of themes in the film that we identify with in terms of being a woman in largely male dominated world. Abi's screenplay takes a very particular look at -- she's very interested in details, fragments and there are a lot of details in the film that we see and feel that perhaps are not the obvious territory for a film about a politician. But because we notice little things that to us are significant. That's all to do with the fact that it's a film about memory and I think it's definitely three women's idea of a woman's journey. Do you agree Abi?

Abi Morgan- Yes very much so. Also because it's a film about memory, it's about a woman who is being hijacked by memories so that way we can come in very left of field again through the details through the random moment that you remember. So you may remember what you were eating but you don't necessarily remember the nature of the conversation but you remember that there was a sort of atmosphere when you were eating and we kind of went in in that way.