Raising the Profile of Women In Adventure Sport
5th Nov 2014
By Lissa Cook, ShAFF PR & co-organiser.
Over the past couple of years ShAFF has been criticised for the lack of women on the big screen and in our trailer. On the one hand, our response is ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’. The reality is that the majority of films submitted to ShAFF are made by men starring men. Only a fifth of last year’s films were either made by or featured women and sadly none of those were suitable for our Young Adventurers’ screenings.
On the other hand, it’s simply not good enough. That’s why in 2013, we hosted an expert night with the Women’s Climbing Symposium and started an online debate with SportSister magazine with female athletes like climber Lucy Creamer, snowboarder Julia Pickering, ultra-runner Sarah Ridgway and filmmakers like Jen Randall and our 2014 trailer producer Lukasz Warzecha (producer of Epic TV’s Wild Women series). We’ve also highlighted films made by women, or featuring women on our website.
In turn that led to me attending the Women in Sport Trust’s Women’s Sport Trust #BeAGamerChanger event in London and a partnership with the new Sport Is Beautiful campaign. When Nicola Underdown, from the BMC’s Equity Steering Group, and Emily Pitts from Women Climb approached us asking if we’d work with them on a BMC TV Women in Mountain Adventure film competition - to promote women’s climbing films with a £500 prize, we were delighted to be able to offer space in the programme for the winning film at ShAFF 2015.
Thanks to Lowepro and MyOutdoors we are now also able to announce that a whole floor of the Workstation will be dedicated to a Women in Adventure photo exhibition, with images either featuring female athletes or taken by female photographers. And we’ll have a special Women in Adventure prize category within our Lowepro Single Shot photo competition open to amateurs and pros alike.
As ShAFF continues to grow, we’ve also decided to launch a ShAFF Fringe, organised by Dave Mycroft at MyOutdoors.co.uk. Building on the success of our Industry Hangout events for filmmakers and partners, this year ShAFF will host a series of fringe panels, talks and workshops including a debate on Women In Adventure Sport.
Festival Director Matt Heason is actively sourcing more films featuring and made by women so if you are a female filmmaker or are making a film featuring women, we’d love to hear from you. The official film submission deadline is 1st December but if you have a project that may not make the cut off, please do still get in touch. We have scope to be flexible and even if we can’t screen it at ShAFF, we want to widen our networks and look ahead to the next Cycle To The Cinema season, Buxton Adventure Festival 2015 and ShAFF 2016.
I’m a 40 year old woman. The debate we’ve been having over the past three years makes me think that we can’t single-handedly revolutionise the industry but we can lead by example and work with female athletes and filmmakers in the same way we do with local Peak District producers and photographers.
We promise that all our films will only ever be selected on merit. It’s why we spend long, winter evenings watching hundreds of films. Perhaps it’s not realistic to expect ShAFF 2015 to achieve a 50:50 ratio. I wonder if and when this may ever be a reality. That said, audience figures from ShAFF's sister festival, the Buxton Adventure Festival, where we've made a big effort to find female speakers, are encouraging. Audience splits at BAF are 45% female / 55% male compared to ShAFF's 40/60 ratios.
Hearing 21 year old BMC Ambassador Shauna Coxsey and 11 year old Amy Meek and her 9 year old sister Ella (DoTryThisAtHome.com) talk at the University of Derby’s Young Adventurers Awards at this year's BAF has also reinforced my optimism that there’s a huge generational shift in attitudes underway, reinforced by campaigns like Sport England's This Girl Can, Always' video #LikeAGirl (which has been viewed nearly 50 million times) and Spike Lee’s Chevrolet advert featuring 13 year old Little League baseball player Mo’ne Davis was aired during the World Series.
We hope the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival can play our small part in encouraging the next generation to believe they can have adventures #LikeAGirl.
Read press release
Join the debate on Facebook at www.facebook.com/HeasonEvents and Twitter @HeasonEvents and @Heason_Lissa #ShAFF2015
Photos left to right, top: Sarah Ridgway Mountain Runner, produced & photo by Lukasz Warzecha (screened at ShAFF 2014); Mina Leslie Wujastyk in Project Mina, directed by Jen Randall (part of the Brit Rock Film Tour); Push It, directed by Jen Randall (screened at ShAFF 2013). Bottom: Half the Road, directed by Kathryn Bertine (screened at ShAFF 2014).; Keeper Of The Mountains, directed by Allison Otto (screened at ShAFF 2014); Maidentrip, directed by Jillian Schlesinger (screened at ShAFF 2014).
