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.

Email Melissa

Purchase In Her Voice

Blog Roll

Guest Review: The Sleeping Beauty - directed by Catherine Breillat by Emilie Spiegel

There was no way I wasn’t going to love Catherine Breillat’s latest film, The Sleeping Beauty (La belle endormie). It covers all my bases: female-centric (check), arty and lusciously imagined (check), and of course, French. I love everything I’ve ever seen from Breillat, and her current offering fits in nicely within her oeuvre of sex-positive feminist provocation (with a particular fascination towards youth and adolescence). Her works maintain a poignant paradox that so many films about young people cannot manage; the young heroine in the Breillat imaginary is naïve, yet wise, curious, yet stubborn, innocent, yet awakened. In the case of The Sleeping Beauty, the awakening is both literal and figurative.