What is Filmify?
Our story and mission
The concept for Filmify started in Spring 2020. After looking at the horrendous lack of diversity in Academy Awards Best Picture winners, team member Natalie decided to investigate her viewing habits from March 2019 — March 2020. For each film she logged in Letterboxd, she looked at the directors’ racial and gender diversity.
Out of about 140 films she watched from March 2019–2020:
- 91 films were directed by white men.
- 7 films were directed by Black directors, only 1 film was directed by a Black woman.
- 10 films were directed by Asian directors, 3 were directed by Asian women.
- 4 films were directed by Latin American directors.
- 1 film was directed by an Indigenous person.
- No films were directed by Latin American or Indigenous women.
As someone who had always advocated for better inclusion in the film industry, she was shocked.
In Fall 2020, we — Natalie, Srilekha, Josh, Karisa, and Celine — decided to investigate the lack of off-screen diversity in the US film industry for our Interaction Design undergraduate capstone project.
Where are the diverse filmmakers?
Talented, diverse filmmakers exist and are out there with stories for audiences to discover. Thanks to historical biases within the US film industry, it has become a continuing cycle of more roadblocks and fewer opportunities for people of underrepresented races and genders.
In early 2020, film executives — the people who decide which stories get told and who tells them — at Hollywood’s 11 major and mid-major studios were 91% white and 82% male (UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report 2020). Despite calls for inclusivity, people continue to hire who they already know. With fewer diverse film executives hired, they greenlight fewer diverse films, and the issues multiply.
While movements like #OscarsSoWhite and Time’s Up began the conversation, Filmify hopes to amplify the ongoing discussion of equity and inclusion in Hollywood, acting as a wake-up call to film enthusiasts and the industry.
Introducing Filmify
Off-screen representation may be out of sight, but it should not be out of mind. And while this is a large, deeply-ingrained issue, we can tackle it by watching films by more diverse filmmakers and continuing the conversation.
That’s why we created Filmify — the first online platform that offers a personalized experience for Western film viewers to learn more about and discover films with diverse representation in front of and behind the camera in an industry that is dominated by white men.
We provide users:
- Information about the current state of race and gender diversity in Hollywood.
- Data about the on and off-screen diversity of their own current film choices.
- Personalized recommendations of films by diverse filmmakers.
- A searchable database of films and their diversity information.
Ultimately, we empower people to take action towards a more equitable film industry by increasing their awareness of lesser-known films made by and starring underrepresented talent. Filmify hopes to drive viewership and box office (or Video on Demand) dollars for films made by diverse filmmakers and not just those that Hollywood and the Academy Awards decide to highlight.
What’s coming
We plan to launch Filmify by April 25, 2021, the date of this year’s Academy Awards. Until then, join the new waitlist on our site and stay tuned on our Medium page for weekly sneak peeks of our design and development process behind the scenes!
Further reading
Sources we used in our initial research:
- UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report 2020
- Race, Gender, Hollywood: Representation in Cultural Production and Digital Media’s Potential for Change
- Critic’s Choice 2: Gender and Race/Ethnicity of Film Reviewers Across 300 Top Films from 2015–2017
- Inclusion in the Director’s Chair: Analysis of Director Gender & Race/Ethnicity Across 1,300 Top Films from 2007 to 2019
- Inequality in 1,300 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBTQ & Disability from 2007 to 2019
- Representing race: the race spectrum subjectivity of diversity in film
- #OscarsSoWhite: how Stuart Hall explains why nothing changes in Hollywood and everything is changing
