For women film directors, bias is something you can feel but can’t always prove

I’m a documentary film director and feminist documenting my own journey as I bring my debut feature film, Adele and Everything After, to the big screen.
Before talking about anything else, it feels important to talk about the fact that this movie is a film by women, about women and for women. While women are making huge strides, overall I can report that making a woman’s film in a man’s world is not easy.
Over the almost 3-year journey of making this documentary, I came to learn that the bias against female directors and women-centric films isn’t always something you can point to, quantify or prove. But it’s something you can feel, and as a female director, it’s something you must be prepared to handle.
I started working on this film in 2014, which feels like a lifetime ago. We hadn’t got to diversity conversations like #oscarssowhite yet and there was far less national conversation about the lack of women directors, cinematographers and writers in Hollywood.
When I started working on Adele and Everything After, it was because I met Marty and her service dog, Adele, and was fascinated by their story and believed others would be, too. I didn’t think about the fact that I was a woman director working with many women crew telling the story of a woman with a “disability” (an untreatable heart condition called vasovagal syncope).
Anyone making a low-budget indie documentary is going to feel like they’re up against certain obstacles, but as time went on and the national dialogue about filmmaking and representation shifted, I became more aware that we were different — and that the challenges we faced were even tougher than what the average male filmmaker comes up against. For example:
- The Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film at San Diego State University looked at 23 festivals held in the United States in 2016–17 and found that their programmers selected features directed by men three times as often as those made by women. The findings also showed that programmers chose twice as many documentaries directed by men.
- Films by women directors tend to be picked up by smaller distributors and therefore women-helmed films are bought for less money and often have smaller marketing and publicity campaigns, hence achieve less financial and critical success.
- Speaking of critics: they are predominantly men. And that colors both the films they review, and how they review them.
- Women filmmakers, even those with a track record of success like Twilight’s Catherine Hardwicke, speak out regularly about how hard it is for films by women and starring women to get financed. Even having a hit movie (or several) under your belt isn’t enough for many women directors to raise the budget for their next film, or to get offered the big directing jobs that typically go to men.
These statistics paint a stark picture of the world female filmmakers are working in. But there are so many factors which determine the performance of your movie, that it’s difficult to truly understand whether — and how much — gender is influencing your success as a filmmaker.
For example, the submission process for film festivals is opaque, and rife with cronyism. How to know if your film was rejected because it was reviewed by a male programmer who didn’t “get it” or whether some other factor came into play (including that it simply wasn’t good enough)? I know that Adele and Everything After was chosen by multiple film festivals with female programmers or with a focus on films by female directors. Is that a coincidence, or is it correlated?
The most significant way I’ve felt the impact of the bias against women’s films has been feedback that the film is “too sad”. That there are too many tears, or water imagery, or that there’s too much soft, golden light. At one pitch competition, someone on the judging panel took aggressively against the film because it had a protagonist who wept too many times. I was told that I could show my Marty crying once or twice, but any more than that would be too much for audiences. And I’ll note that it was a woman, probably around my age, who gave that feedback.
This upset me, but certainly didn’t surprise me. I came up in a working world that taught me to choke back my tears so I didn’t look “weak” and to deride women who came across as too “emotional”. So I get it. We’ve been told that being in touch with our feelings, and being capable of expressing them, is bad for our careers.
And I understand that not everyone wants to go to the movies and feel sad. But the opposite is true, as well. Sometimes, a comedy feels all wrong. Many people love seeing a character, real or fictional, portray vulnerability on-screen. One of the things that makes me the most proud about Adele and Everything After is how open our star, Marty, is about sharing her struggles.
Yet I was encouraged, again and again, to dismiss and downplay the emotional elements in our marketing for the film, lest it scare audiences away.
I made a movie about a woman’s painful and ultimately life-affirming journey. Of course there are tears. I wondered if someone would tell the director of a horror movie that he shouldn’t have so many scary scenes, or the director of a comedy that there were too many laughs (“it’s a great film, but could you make it a little less funny?”).

For a while, I felt pressure to make my movie match up with what felt normal and safe and acceptable to people who “knew better.” But the more I tried to conform to some expectation established by Hollywood or film festivals or the bullshit patriarchal norms that govern most of our society, the more wrong and uncomfortable I felt.
There’s so much content out there, and it’s hard to find your audience when you have a small budget. You need a strong sense of what your movie is about, who it’s for and why they want to watch it.
Well, my movie is about a sick woman’s journey to letting go and self-acceptance. It’s for other women. And you should watch it because it will make you think about the relationships in your own life that have mattered. It will make you cry. Ultimately, it will leave you feeling inspired.
And with all that said, I’m extra proud that our next two screenings of Adele and Everything After will be at film festivals that prominently feature female directors and movies about women. We’re screening the movie at Long Beach Indie International Film Festival on Friday, September 1st (you can buy tickets at aaea.co/longbeach) and at Milwaukee Women’s Film Festival on September 8th (tickets here).
Melissa Dowler is the director of Adele and Everything After, a feature documentary about a woman with an untreatable heart condition and the service dog who transforms her life, produced by Long Haul Films. Want to stay up-to-date with news about upcoming screenings, service dogs and our filmmaking journey? Text DOG to 44144 or go to adelemovie.com/subscribe
