Belcourt’s Strong Leads Seminar for High School Girls Spotlights #MeToo

On a Tuesday evening at the Belcourt Theatre, 24 high school girls huddle together and imagine new rules for Hollywood. They jot down the new order on sticky notes, and Allison Inman, education and engagement director at the historic theater, invites them to share with the group.

 One at a time, the girls slap their notes onto the whiteboard and issue proclamations. No unsolicited gifts. Make salaries public. Design a reasonable, consistent work schedule. If you see sexual harassment taking place on set, say something. No more sexualizing children. 

The girls call out in agreement, they snap their fingers, they applaud. 

This feminist amen corner is called Strong Leads: A Film Seminar for High School Girls. Designed by Inman and artist Daisy Stackpole, Strong Leads met on Tuesdays throughout April with the goal of exploring gender representation in Hollywood through films directed by women and with female protagonists. For Inman, the program — which she and Stackpole first launched in fall 2016 — was long in the making. 

“I am always showing films to students, and I’m constantly reminded that women are underrepresented in the films that I show,” says Inman. “I can’t find enough films by female directors, and I can’t find enough films with female protagonists — especially female protagonists of color.”

The statistics back her up. The media scholars at USC Annenberg surveyed gender, race and age of film directors across 1,000 feature films made between 2007 and 2016. The study found that in the 10-year sample, only 4 percent of films were directed by women. Of those, three directors were black, three were Asian and one was Latina. Then there are the Academy Awards. In 90 years, just five women have been nominated for the Best Director Oscar. Only one has won — Kathryn Bigelow in 2010.

The night of the third seminar of the series, the girls have just watched Frida, starring Salma Hayek, and the #MeToo movement is on their minds. Hayek’s explosive New York Times op-ed depicted a monstrous Harvey Weinstein who, enraged over Hayek’s refusal to submit to him sexually, terrorized her on the set of Frida. The girls skillfully connect Frida Kahlo’s struggle to find recognition as an artist with Hollywood’s gender problem, and they celebrate her success, as well as Hayek’s.

Isabelle Leonard of Mt. Juliet aspires to direct films. “My school is a way different culture than Nashville is, and it’s really nice to be surrounded by women who aren’t blinded by society’s subconscious ideas of what women should be,” she says. “And it’s nice to see that I’m not the only one who wants to do these things and who feels empowered.”

Other films in the series include Dee Rees’ Pariah, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Lisa Krueger’s Manny & Lo. Inman hopes spotlighting these films can cause a ripple effect in the lives of young women who may now see the disparities across different industries. 

Milly West, a junior at University School of Nashville, connects the dots to larger sociological factors. “I get home, and I kind of get a little existential about this,” she says. “Like, what about the girls that don’t have this, the girls that want to be filmmakers or doctors or lawyers or anything that in society we’ve labeled a man’s job, especially a white man’s job? I can’t even think about it without wanting to cry — how privileged and fortunate I am to have these opportunities and how I want to be able to show women everywhere that this is possible and this is your potential.”