 Well thank you Deborah Zimmerman you're here with us today in the CCTV studios and you were awarded by the Vermont International Film Festival with the let me get the words right the outstanding contribution to American Cinema Award. It sounds so big. It is it's a big deal. You've been working for Women Make Movies. Tell me a little bit about that organization and how you came to do that work. Oh gosh it's a long story because the organization was founded in 1972. I came to the organization in the late 70s. It was founded as a collective to teach women how to make films because there were so few women that had the skills to actually make films that knew how to shoot a camera use sound equipment and for the first six years or so seven years of the of the organization's existence that's what it did. It had a workshop in Chelsea which was a Latino neighborhood in New York City and they put up signs in churches and neighborhood bodega saying come women come muchachas come nurses and housewives come make movies and they did and they made all these really cool little short films. And who were the people that were involved in that? Well there was a woman named Arielle Docherty and another woman named Sheila Page and another woman named Dolores Bartkowski. I didn't it's funny for many years I didn't know that there was a third person that was involved in founding the organization and yeah they just now there's actually filmmakers that are more well known that weren't in the workshops but were people that were actually after the workshops it became more of a of a well it was it became more of an organization for not professionals but for people for women who wanted to make films not so much neighborhood kind of I mean they made a film called how to cut up a chicken they made a film about a neighborhood journalist and then some other film makes some other film and women came and now there's a woman named Greta Schiller who has made a number of films and okay yeah I'm getting a little bit a little bit lost anyway. Well that I mean it sounds a little like similar it sounds like a similar origin story to like an organization like CCTV or community media. Yeah it was it was in fact the women wanted they wanted to take on they wanted it to get I don't know what the word is get the license for the cable TV channel in New York yeah it was very very community based and where were their films being shown where were those stories being told just in neighborhood places and the same churches and not bodegas but churches and high schools and outdoors yeah and you grew up in New York at that time is that right no no no I grew up in Long Island I was born in New York City but I grew up in Long Island I went to school at New Paltz upstate New York and I was there just for the very end of what was not the 60s but was the 60s New Paltz was and Berkeley and New Paltz were the last two schools that over that were like really demonstrating and we took over the administration building we had a lot of fun we wanted black studies we wanted women's studies we wanted yeah to things to change on campus and as a result I ended up having a fantastic wonderful teacher named Alice Ficks who said to taught I had a class in feminist theater and another class in I haven't told the story and another class in violence against women I mean you know this is 1974 I guess and she said you know you're interested in film I was studying film and I was studying women's studies she said you have to go to this women's weekend it was women WOMYN it was a cultural weekend for women and she said there's this group called women make movies and I went and they were showing a film in a barn and they were all women watching this movie that was that was about women feminists it was like the first time I saw a film that actually reflected my life on screen and I thought wow if I could do this I'd be really happy what was it was there something in your upbringing was there something in you that brought you to that was it the world in which you were swimming well you know it is so interesting there's always people who I think have an oversized influence on your life I had a friend she was just a very very good friend in fact I still know her we just spoke on the phone for the first time in many many years last week and her mother was a real feminist her mother was and an activist she was a political activist and we went to Washington demonstrating against the Vietnam War moratorium days and I canvassed for the farm workers and I just became very political and I was I was a baby feminist and it was seared into me and then when I went to school went to university I met this guy who was just a friend not a boyfriend or anything it was an art school New Paltz was an art school and he was an artist and I never thought that I'd be involved with art but he made me believe that art was the most important thing in the world and I put I couldn't draw so I thought hmm movies I was a I was an AV club in high school I ended up getting a job as a projectionist and seeing all these films and I put together a major I had to like create my own major because I wanted to take art classes but I wasn't in the art department and long story short I ended up studying film and I knew that I wanted to work in film but I also was so my feminism was so strong that I didn't want I didn't want to do it without also working with women and there was really only two organizations that I knew of one was women make movies and the other was Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press was also I was very involved with communicate I created a major in communication studies and I was very involved with Freedom of the Press and and actually New Paltz was in the Hudson Valley in New York and Hudson Valley was very underserved by by media because there was no cable then and it couldn't get a signal from New York so there was there was no local new there's no local news except for radio and then these channels started and anyway it was it was I got very involved with the FCC and regulations about how media was gonna was being controlled and when the not the was it the fairness doctrine I think it was the fairness doctrine yeah cable act maybe yeah no no it was before the cable act my I had a job going to the local radio stations and the television stations that had gotten started to look at their rosters to see how many women and how many blacks were employed and what the content of the programming was interesting so yes so my my interest was very much a political orientation it was very mission it was very mission-based I it was artistic but it was also about why the films are being made and what kinds of films are being made and so for a while I worked in production but you know it just the last one I worked on Robert Duvall was directing and he was so sexist and so creepy and so it had no content you know just no content so I went back to I'd been an intern at women make movies when I got out of school took me about three months of riding my bicycle in front of the building where we make movies was before I knocked on the door and said I just want to be an intern it would ride past yeah be like yeah should I stop should I stop absolutely absolutely I was I was I was nervous it was so important to me that it yeah it took me a really long time and now 40 years later it's still my life yeah so you've been you sort of grown up in that organization a lot absolutely you know when you're talking you're sort of touching on it and it seems like the silliest question asked but why is it important to make why is it important who's controlling the camera and making this movies and telling the story well I just came from teaching a class at the University on exactly that you know there's some there's so many reasons but I think the most important one is that well I say that women make movies the films that we distribute because we are a distributor we're the largest distributor of films buying about women in the world that we distribute films for empowerment and subversion we distribute films to give women a vision of themselves that they don't often see to empower them in order to create their own lives in order to learn about things in order to to to feel in a different way for young women to see role models to see strong women to see women who are complex and complicated and and not just the blonde bombshell not just the housewife I mean it sounds like that's old but it's not if you look at the statistics it's still unbelievable 31% of the people speaking in films are women that's one third of the speaking parts are women that to me is just so astounding the idea that in 2023 that if you go to the movies and by the way you know women do not even make up one-third of the directors making films in the United States it is it's gone down in 2015 it was 15% of the 1500 let's say the 1500 largest films being made and in 2022 it went down to 8% so what are girls saying when they go to the movies let's not talk about Barbie or let's talk about Barbie but the other part so the so that's that's one part the other part and actually well Barbie I can I could use Barbie the other part is subversion you know the other part is getting films to people who need to see the films they don't know that they need to see the films but they do did you think there was anything subversive about Barbie well I will get there in one second let me just finish that thought and they'll go to Barbie so and it's interesting because I was telling you that I was just in Finland and I had a very interesting discussion about Barbie with the students in Finland but when we make movies after these kind of go backwards to go forward so after we made all of these or I wasn't in the organization at the time when they made all of these short films out of these workshops they collectively made a film called health caring from our end of the speculum and it was really kind of like our bodies ourselves on film when that film nobody it won a blue ribbon at the most important educational festival in the U.S. but nobody would distribute it they said there was no market for it so the organization started just distribution with that film and it was very very successful and when that film got used in film school in sorry medical schools and doctors will be having an opportunity to hear women talk about their health issues from their own perspective that's a version you know that's like getting a message out and that was nineteen seventy six that film was made this year or last couple of two years ago well we just we have a film that's being that we're releasing now called neuro divergent which is about women and invisible disabilities we have another film called belly of the beast which is about women in California who are shackled in prison when they're giving birth and miscarry because of it there's still this there are so many issues that still have yet to be seen in mainstream media dealt with in mainstream media that are so important so yeah so that's a version so now Barbie is Barbie subversive well the interesting thing about it is that when I I hated the film I mean I just I I was appalled I was appalled that it's the most successful film ever made by woman I was appalled that it was still the same image of a tall long-legged beautiful woman in the center of the story but when I asked my staff who haven't you know everybody it seemed Barbie like how many liked it everybody was like well you know it's feminism light but one of them said I went with my 11 year old brother and actually it was really great because he it kind of opened his eyes a bit and somebody else said I went with my mother who's not a feminist and it actually had an impact on her that's a version like when I was in Finland and I talked to these young these young high school students they also were very they were critical in the same way that I was critical but they also talked about how important it was for these issues just to be talked about and the one scene that kept on coming up which happens to be one of the things that I really did like in the film was when Ken thinks that he can be a doctor even though he has absolutely no training right but he's mansplaining he's like yeah he's gonna go be a doctor just because he's gonna be a doctor and that idea of how men see themselves and see the world and how they act in the world and how different it is I think is it is actually a bit subversive because it isn't really you don't see that in a whole lot of Hollywood films so you're just too far out of your time still well look you know things have they've gotten so much better than it than they were but and people but people still ask me you know what about men make movies and I still say it men do make movies it's called Hollywood there have been amazing accomplishments but as I said before the statistics are still really really bad so were we ahead of our time no I think we were behind our time you know there were three women that were making films in the United States mainstream films or Hollywood films from 1930s to the 1960s tell me a little bit about some of the films that have gone through women make movies sure sure so as I said women make movies as the largest distributor films by and about women and we distribute more than 700 films but we all there is a question also I'm just curious how you approach the term women in the days that's so loaded I don't mean it to be loaded I just it's okay it is it is loaded it's hard it's hard because we are well we say that we distribute films that are by women and and women identified people okay so that's kind of the short answer yeah so it's an inclusive it's an absolutely absolutely inclusive yes it is very much and it's very much you know gender is really important I do have to say that I think that it's very complicated because I actually was teaching for a semester at Rutgers and it is very hard to teach about the representation of women without using a binary so the idea of how fluid gender is becomes very it's it's difficult on it's calm it's just complicated and I it's okay that's fine can't continue you were about you were talking about them no that's fine just tribute in it yeah I know what I wanted to say is that that so we distribute films made by and about women but we also have a production assistance program and in the production assistance program we work with women who are in production trying to help them get their films made and the reason for that is it's it's a vestige of the workshops that we did and I just want to give a little bit of history because I think it's kind of interesting so when I came to the organization as an intern I then ended up as the director and I became the director because it was the director of nothing the organization had been very nicely funded by a program called CEDA which was the comprehensive employment training act that Carter put in when he was president and when Reagan came in he decided that women had already accomplished enough right and there was no need for the part of the National Endowment for the arts for the program that funded women so they just got rid of it and we lost our funding we also were having a great difficulty in the state state Arts Council as well and the organization just about went under so I was able to become the director of an organization that was basically falling apart but there was it was really interesting going back to this notion of community because we had a series of meetings I was a volunteer then and we just said anybody that wants has had anything to do with the organization wants to come to a meeting come to a meeting and enough people came and said this was so important in my life that we decided that we try to figure out how to keep it going so the way that we did keep it going was that we decided to focus on distribution because at that time when there were lots of women making films but they weren't getting out distribution actually brought money in so it was an earned income program and I gave up a very well-paying job at a foundation and when I took the job at women make movies I said I don't want to rebuild an organization that's dependent on non-feminists deciding to give us money so I rebuilt it along with a fantastic board and other people as an earned income organization and we've been very unusual like that so even since the 80s 85% of our income is from earning it's money that we earn from licensing and renting films but we always wanted to maintain our commitment to helping women to get their films made so we created a workshop program that was more about the business side of the business how do you raise money how do you market your film how do you clear rights we're talking about that fair use and rights for films and through that we ended up supporting a filmmaker named Julie Dash who made a very important film called Daughters of the Dust which was the first film by an African-American woman to be distributed theatrically in the country and we helped her raise money for the film and through that we broadened it myself and a woman named Michelle Matère unfortunately she passed away last year but she was a tremendous visionary and just an extraordinary person who I worked together with for many years and she stayed with us she was on our board when she passed away she ended up she was actually one of the reasons why it got theatrically distributed because she ended up working with Julie on the on the distribution of Daughters of the Dust but anyway so we started this production assistance program together and through the years more than three thousand women have gotten support from the program we work with them to look at their proposals to introduce them to funders to do these webinars and workshops that give them the background that they need networking all kinds of things that whatever whatever people need and we really feel like we've seated the field because filmmakers like Lena Dunham her first film was sponsored by us Dee Reese who ended up making Mudbound and actually was the first African-American woman to be nominated for best screenplay who hired a woman cinematographer who was the first woman cinematographer nominated for an Academy Award so yeah many many many different kinds of women some of those films end up in distribution so in the production assistance program will support women making films about anything Citizen before by Laura Poitras is a film that was in our program nothing to do with women but other films like the film that actually we didn't sponsor the film that we showed last night I just spoke about a film called coded bias which is about artificial intelligence and the way that it's biased against people of color it's actually available on Netflix and we also distribute it which is very unusual but I'm really glad that we're able to that was a film that was in our production assistance program that we then ended up distributing finding so something has come up you know there's been questions around Netflix and Amazon and you know all of the all of these large media conglomerates we're now in the business of documentaries and movie production kind of you want to talk about that and sure impact has been on you good bad and also sort of the ethics of documentary make documentary filmmaking from that point of from the point of view of like when you get a lot of money involved in interesting questions thinking about of course yeah and then and to be fair you're distributing both narrative films and no mostly documentaries no we started out actually distributing some fiction films daughters of the dust is well we didn't distribute daughters of the dust no no we distribute Julie's first film we distribute her earlier works which was three very short feature films so mostly right well now she makes but she started out she started out with a film called illusions which is a really a wonderful 40-minute film and that we distributed Jane Campion short fiction films so well we that's what I mean about how we work with filmmakers at the beginning of their careers some stay with us and continue to make independent documentaries or in yeah documentaries some go on to Hollywood some go on to make very very big you know not to distract you from the big question no no no because it has it is actually it's interesting we made a decision to not distribute fiction films because we really wanted to be able to work with as many women as we could and fiction and theatrical distribution you know you can really only do about six films a year where at the time we were doing like 30 to 40 short films and really we felt having an impact more on our on our commitment to equity in the end to not just in the industry but to what we see but it doesn't really so okay so this is connected to the streamers because what the streamers have done is given documentaries a bigger platform yeah and in that way it's really great but I will tell you a funny story that I met Ted Surandos who's the CEO or CEO of Netflix when nobody knew what Netflix was there was a conference in Washington and there was about 30 of us talking about distribution and he talked I have this company called Netflix and it's it's using I don't think we use the word algorithms then you know it's the idea of if you like this then you'll like that and he really wanted to just he wanted women make movies films on Netflix and I said no which he did not like but I hold to my decision because I knew back then that there was something that was not going to be good for independent filmmaking in this what's not good for independent filmmaking is that you're basically it's the conglomeration and the global audience that when you're trying to reach everybody you have to have a certain kind of product and that kind of product oftentimes is not independent it's oftentimes not an alternative to mainstream media it is mainstream media and of course what happened is they started out with you know whatever they could buy but then very quickly became the most commercial products that they could find they only started buying documentaries because they were out of other stuff to buy and because it was cheap for them to buy them and they were going global and by the way they've stopped yeah it is so interesting to think of what is mainstream media mainstream media is whatever is mainstream media yeah right and then I mean that sort of gets back to the Barbie when I'm you know the first thing I did after watching Barbie is I went and looked I was like how much is it gonna cost to buy that Ken t-shirt yeah there you go that's the point of it it's like not the whole point of this that is the point of it and then I'm sort of left like I love that rant in the middle but what what's the real bottom line point of all of this work that we're doing and it's not about being in community yes other yeah and about shifting and building on our culture and growing as humans together then I you know well look there are there's definitely I can't I completely agree with you and I can speak to that but I also do want to say that there is something wonderful about having films like coded bias on Netflix you know we have a film called invisible beauty that we sponsored it's a fantastic film about Bethanne Hardison who was kind of the first she was Halston's first black model and who's been an activist her life fighting for diversity in women in the fashion industry women models and again about the representation of women it's gonna be on HBO Max or I guess I call it Max now you know these kinds of films that are able to reach really large audiences it's really important the problem is is the model of conglomerate because what happened is is that after Netflix and Amazon and the companies that you know there are now these educational conglomerates called canopy and Alexandria Street Press and well the other one is owned by independence but and basically universities now pay a certain amount of money for access to this collection and we get a teeny tiny amount of money which we share with our filmmakers and they get an even tinier tiny bit of money and the professors this is really interesting in terms of what do people what university what do people see you know I do believe like you do that seeing films in community is so important and I've always been very committed to the idea that we're reaching students because education we do a lot of educational distribution you're reaching college-age students but at a time in their lives when they actually are very open to ideas and where you can really influence them and seeing films in a classroom at the same time or seeing films in community groups or even in theaters at the same time has a very different impact than watching something when you're home in your apartment by yourself but now what okay I kind of lost my little train of thought there well we're talking about the we're talking about the conglomerates right so the economics of these streamers and the economics of conglomerates are that what ends up happening is that organizations like women make movies or independent distributors can no longer function in the way that they used to because as I told you weren't earned income organization we depend on that income we believe that getting income to our filmmakers with it it's part of what our mission is and it's very much threatened by this by this this model of conglomeration and I know where I was going and I don't want to forget it because it's so important the way that it works within universities is that it gives the decision-making and this is kind of fascinating it gives the decision-making over to the mass the masses meaning the students so if a film is watched a certain amount of times if there's a number of clicks then the university has to license it so what gets licensed things like a clicked things that have sex in it things that are commercial things that are that they could actually that that they can get in other places but rather than something you're gonna watch once in a class in a classroom rather than something that the professors and the librarians rather than the kinds of books that librarians buy not because they're gonna be used a lot but because they're important for a university library to have those books the decision-making was taken out of the hands of librarians and that's that's not good that's not good for anybody yeah it doesn't it doesn't hold up I mean it is we're all swimming in capitalism yeah you know yeah pluses and minuses we're I can't think we've gone well over 30 minutes now and we're this we could keep going I just I do want to you this is the first time you've come to Vermont to vtiff have you gotten to see some films while you're here I'm gonna say something amazing about V tap V you all you all call it vtiff yes no I know what it stands for it's just like vtiff it's sweet I have been absolutely amazed at the quality of the films that they're showing in the festival which but it means that they're films that I've just recently seen at the New York Film Festival and I happen to be extraordinarily busy right now because women make movies just moved and I'm about to go to Amsterdam for the documentary film festival there so I haven't see I saw did I see any films today no I'm gonna see a film tonight I'm gonna see the Iranian film tonight yeah and I will just say to anybody who's watching this go see the films they're fantastic films and you're seeing them with a nice group of people yes we're talking about it like you really are seeing them in community with other folks it's true I really enjoyed I just want to say that I really enjoyed we had a film screening last night which I think you saw Esther Newton made me gay and I enjoyed seeing just a bit of it with that audience because I think that it was it was well received that was a fascinating story and about how literally that whole idea around how you tell a story to change the culture because you pay attention to the culture and by paying attention you know you anyway I ask questions and not trying to answer them but Deborah what's next for you next you're headed off but what's next for women make movies and what's my goodness what's next we're always so it's crazy we've been madly looking at films and we've seen some really amazing films that I can't talk about yet because we don't have the rights to them but I'm very excited about the films that are coming up let's see if there's some that I can talk about that just came out of our production assistance program there's a wonderful film about Nikki Giovanni that I believe was bought by oh goodness it's gonna be on it's gonna be on one of the streamers it's by a wonderful filmmaker named Michelle Stevenson I'm of course going blank well that's okay but if you want to know more I mean obviously we have a website we have a website women make movies WMM dot com is there another proof is there a sort of semester or program that people can get actually right now we have if we're we are running a series of virtual film festivals okay great and right now we have one on media literacy oh it's a great great subject yeah um and we're showing something like seven to ten films completely free anybody who wants to see them can see them oh maybe we'll put together a screening here you could do you could absolutely do that just go on to the website and take a look at them Deborah thanks for coming in and spending some time and congratulations on your award outstanding contribution to American cinema and for those of you who haven't gotten a chance to check out women make movies website and also the Vermont International Film Festival were at about day five of we're halfway through the film festival but there's still stuff going on thanks for watching