Importance Of Representation In Film

Representation in film is important – that’s obvious. For starters, it promotes the acknowledgement of people of color and cements our place in society – it removes the frequent erasure of the ‘other’ through white washing and cultural appropriation. Secondly, it encourages minority children to dream, reach bigger, soar higher – seeing yourself on the big screen helps you feel comfortable in your skin, comfortable in your identity, and most importantly, influences people to find beauty outside of the Eurocentric norm. Representation benefits us all – it breaks down stereotypes and teaches people about humanity.

Yet, we find that representation in media – specifically in women of color – is severely lacking. Out of the top 100 films of 2016, 47 films didn’t include any black women. We need to do better.

The overwhelming fact is that white people – particularly white men – are still the startling majority of leads in film. That could be due to the lack of diversity within Hollywood

Black women have a very vast history of creating and developing films, feature and featurette alike (BAM, an art museum in Brooklyn, did a collection called One Way or Another: Black Women’s Cinema, which detailed the history of black women filmmakers – check out the highlights of that LINK: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/forgotten-treasures-of-black-womens-cinema) and in that history there has been frequent erasure and lack of institutional support – in fact, Daughter’s of the Dust, the first film directed by an black woman to be distributed theatrically in the US, was only released 26 years ago – in 1991. We need to be ready to provide additional support where it’s lacking so that films directed, produces, and written by black women can become more recurrent and more importantly, more