Key movie industry women from across the world, including Indian actor and director Nandita Das, took the stage Saturday morning for the 43rd Toronto International Film Festival's 'Share Her Journey' rally to draw attention to the urgent need for gender equality behind the camera and on the screen.
Coming less than a year after Harvey Weinstein was knocked off his position of immense power by sexual assault allegations, the initiative recognised that the industry, and the world, would be a better place if it gave more space to women's voices.
Canadian singer-songwriter Molly Johnson got the crowd, half of which was male, into the swing of things by crooning the rally anthem: Sing your protest song as you march along. Activists carried placards declaring that "man of quality do not fear equality" and wore badges that said "I stand with women in film".
Das, the second speaker of the day after Oscar-winning actor Geena Davis, said, "We all have multiple identities, but I cannot get away from my gender identity. I now completely own my identity as a woman director. We all must."
Das, whose second directorial venture, "Manto", had its North American premiere in TIFF later in the day, said, "On the Indian subcontinent, we live in several centuries. It's a land of paradoxes. The South Asian nations have had women heads of state, but the sex ratio here is alarming. Girls are killed in the womb."
Davis, who founded the Geena Davis Institute of Gender in Media in 2007, said "I'm heartened by TIFF's 50:50 by 2020 initiative."
Before the rally, it was TIFF artistic director Cameron Bailey who pledged his organisation's commitment to ensure 50:50 representation for women in the festival by the year 2020.
In the lineup for this year's edition of TIFF, 35 percent of the films have been directed by women, while 136 of the film have women in principal roles.
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Davis asserted that change could come about overnight if the entertainment industry showed the will to ensure gender parity in screen roles and behind the camera responsibilities.
She said that there should be "no more missed opportunities when it came to making movies and television shows more gender balanced."
"If you're involved in any way in any production of a movie or a TV show, you have a chance to change it and make it gender balanced, do a gender pass. Don't let it get cast or shot until somebody looks at it and you go through it and you say, 'who here can become female?'" Davis said.
Also among the speakers were Canadian actor Mia Kirshner, British actor and director Amma Asante and the founder of USC Anneberg Inclusion Initiative, Stacy L Smith.
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