More women are working on independently-produced documentary films than ever before — and more film festivals are doing their part to screen them, according to a new study obtained by IndieWire.
San Diego State University professor Dr. Martha Lauzen‘s annual study “Indie Women” found that women employed in any capacity on documentary films between 2023 and 2024 reached historic highs in the indie film industry. And for the first time in her study dating back to 2008, on average, the number of documentary films directed by women that played at film festivals outnumbered those directed by men.
The “Indie Women” study looked at over 650 films and 8,750 film credits for movies that played at 20 different major U.S. film festivals, including Sundance, AFI Fest, SXSW Film, and Tribeca. On average, nine documentaries that played at those fests were directed by a woman, compared to just eight directed by men. When looking at narrative features, only seven on average were directed by women versus 11 for men.
However, across all the observed documentaries, women were still just 44 percent of the people working behind-the-scenes on films as directors, writers, producers, EPs, composers, cinematographers, or editors, versus 56 percent men. But in nearly each field, those were historic highs for documentaries, such as 45 percent of directors and 45 percent of writers were women.
But documentaries were the only filmmaking field where women thrived.
In every role on narrative features, the representation percentages fell from 2023-24. The number of women working across fiction and non-fiction dipped two percentage points from this calendar year to last, with just 37 percent of credited individuals working behind-the-scenes being women, despite the growth seen in the documentary field.
As tends to be the case, the study also found that movies with female directors predictably have more women employed as composers, cinematographers, editors, and other below-the-line roles. On films with at least one woman director, women comprised 76 percent of writers, 50 percent of editors, and 32 percent of cinematographers. On films with exclusively male directors, women accounted for 10 percent of writers, 21 percent of editors, and 7 percent of cinematographers.
Dating back to 2008, Lauzen’s report has analyzed credits on over 11,500 films and tracked nearly 125,000 film credits.
It is unclear, however, how many of these documentary films that promote female talent actually get acquired for studio distribution. This year, Netflix made a splash for “Daughters” out of Sundance, which is directed by Angela Patton and Natalie Rae. “Sugarcane” by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat was also picked up by Nat Geo. Both films figure to be strong contenders in the Oscars race for Best Documentary Feature, but there is not data included in the “Indie Women” study about distribution as a whole.
