A lack of funding, and ignorance in the institutions that control it, keeps women at an inherent disadvantage in the film industry, Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat said at a Tokyo International Film Festival talk on the future of women’s cinema. The talk, part of the festival’s Tokyo Talk sessions at the TIFF Lounge in Tokyo Midtown Hibiya, also featured Serbian director Jelena Maksimović, whose “Until the Day Ends” played in Venice’s Orizzonti section. Sadat, now based in Germany, saw her latest feature “No Good Men” open the 76th Berlinale before screening in Tokyo.
Film scholar and presenter Takasaki Ikuko moderated. The session followed other reflections on women’s careers in film at the festival, both in its Women’s Empowerment section and at an animation symposium held earlier the same day on the past, present and future of four women working as directors in the anime industry. The panel set out to discuss how women and feminism are presented in Sadat’s and Maksimović’s films and beyond, but it turned mostly to the practical, financial barriers standing in the way of more films directed by women.
Both filmmakers said getting the means to make a film often requires a certain conformity. Maksimović said Film Center Serbia “worked decently” for a few years, until the outgoing government cut off its funding entirely in retaliation for filmmakers’ frequent support of the student anti-corruption protests. The student-led movement, which grew out of protests over the deadly 2024 collapse of a train station canopy in Novi Sad, won Serbia’s snap parliamentary election on Oct. 25.
Aleksandar Vučić had resigned as president in September. We’re very happy at the moment, but there’s a huge fight in front of us,” Maksimović said, adding that the damage done by the previous regime would take time to repair. These weren’t definitive reasons for the scarcity of Serbian films playing in Japan, she added, but male filmmakers in the country had enjoyed a privilege that women didn’t have.
Later, Maksimović returned to the topic, saying there is a certain solidarity among filmmakers making less mainstream features, but that it’s also a “certain kind of bubble,” one separate from what she called “big funding.” “We didn’t dare to apply to the big funding to get more money for our films because we knew we wouldn’t get the money there,” she said. She hopes the student movement’s victory gives the system a chance to be overhauled. Sadat also spoke about the forces limiting filmmaking in Afghanistan.
Getting even a slight chance at the same privileges, she added, takes capitulation, submission and compromise. In my case, it was European filmmaking,” Sadat said. That system still has its inequalities, Sadat said.
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