Cate Blanchett launches program to empower female, trans & nonbinary filmmakers

Cate Blanchett has launched a program to empower female, trans, and nonbinary filmmakers.

A partnership with Blanchett’s Dirty Films co-founder Coco Francini and Dr. Stacy L. Smith, founder of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the new Proof of Concept Accelerator Program at USC aims to provide funding and mentorship for filmmakers whose work promotes the perspective of women, trans, and nonbinary folks, according to People.

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The Oscar-winning star of TÁR told the magazine that the initiative was partly inspired by a recent experience she had on a film set.

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“I had assumed, because things have shifted, and we’re all talking the big talk about the way the industry has changed, that the set that I was going to walk onto would be diverse,” Blanchett said. “I was not only the only woman in front of the camera, I was the only woman on set.”

“My shoulders sank,” she added. “I wasn’t angry, I was disappointed.”

She cited data compiled by Smith and the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. In its most recent annual report, the think tank found that only 6 percent of directors across 1,600 top-grossing movies from 2007 to 2022 were women, while less than a third of all speaking roles in those films were girls, women, trans, or nonbinary characters.

“I think that’s what motivated all of us to try and find a really functional, turbo-powered initiative that would help, from our perspective, tackle the challenges that we see,” Blanchett explained. “This initiative is really, really exciting.”

Francini said that the program will focus on addressing three key obstacles that female, trans, and nonbinary directors frequently face: money, mentorship, and exposure.

Applications for the program open in January, after which up to eight filmmakers will be selected to receive $50,000 to fund a short film. As the program’s name suggests, the idea is that those shorts will serve as “proof of concept” for a feature or TV series.

“When it comes to frequently marginalized voices, people feel that they don’t know how to advocate for themselves financially,” Blanchett explained. “This program [will help] people realize through making a short film what their feature could be like so when they take it to a studio or a streaming service or whoever, they are able to budget it, and they know what to ask for and who to ask for that money.”

Participants in the Proof of Concept program will also get one-on-one mentorship from industry leaders, and their work will be featured in a project showcase.

In “risk-averse” Hollywood, Blanchett said the program aims to arm participants “with the tools to say: ‘This is not a risk. This is going to add value to you as a company and to audiences who haven’t seen something like this before.’”

“We’re missing an enormous creative opportunity by not diversifying. We deplore creative laziness, we deplore financial laziness, and so we should therefore deplore a lack of inclusivity,” she said of the industry. “Homogeneity in any industry is the death of progress and innovation. That’s certainly the case for the creative industries. When you walk onto a set that is homogenous, you can sort of taste the outcome. The things that break through that are fresh, that have influence for the next decade, always start because someone took a risk on them.”