The 2015 Athena Film Festival at Barnard College begins tomorrow (2/6/15) and goes all weekend!
Lucky me, since I now I live in Brooklyn, I am able to attend the AFF, so I bought an “All-Access Pass” as soon as they went on sale. Last year, I saw so much that I barely had time to eat a bagel between screenings.
Here is part of what AFF Artistic Directed/Co-Founder Melissa Silverstein said to Anna Silman in a recent article posted on Slate.com:
AS: How has the festival grown and changed during your five years there?
MS: Oh my goodness, in every single way I think it’s changed.
I think one of the biggest things is the fact that people are ready to talk about these things in a different way than they might not have been five years ago, and how the conversation has evolved related to issues and women onscreen and women behind the scenes.
So the festival has taken on a different kind of meaning. People want to talk about why they are not seeing themselves onscreen. People want to talk about the lack of opportunities for women behind the scenes. While we show films directed by men and women, our whole slate of film is women onscreen. So we’re completely opposite to what the Hollywood mainstream box office offers you, which is bereft of women. We’re only women onscreen.
So it’s like a great kind of moment, where you can pause and you can say, “Oh, we are 50 percent of the population and our stories matter.”
Follow THIS LINK to read Anna Silman’s entire interview with Melissa Silverstein.
Follow THIS LINK for an excellent article about AFF in the Wall Street Journal.
Click HERE for the complete AFF 2015 schedule 🙂
NOTE: Why “Athena” and who was Athena anyway?
Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration, civilization and the arts! The city of Athens (Greece) is named for her.
