What this year’s Tropfest winning film tells us about mothers in the screen industry
- Written by Sheree Gregory, Senior Lecturer Human Resource Management, University of Newcastle
Lianne Mackessy’s film Crescendo won top prize at this year’s prestigious Tropfest short-film festival – a significant personal and industry milestone.
The film’s central figure mirrors Mackessy – a women navigating the imperfect, complicated and often chaotic terrain of raising children while working in a screen industry dominated by men.
Reflecting on the film’s genesis, Mackessy explained feeling pressured after having a baby to “hurry up and get back into things”.
The audience is privy to this pressure as we watch the lead character Viv (Laura Bunting) expressing milk and wrangling a toddler and new baby, while warming up her vocals for an audition callback.
A male dominated industry
Mackessy’s story reflects the realities of mothers juggling the competing demands of paid work and life. Research has found there exists a perceived incompatibility between mothering and working in film and television – a problem left for individual mothers to solve alone.
The discomfort is palpable and deeply relatable for mothers who have been (and continue to be in) this situation.
As tension mounts over the day in Crescendo, we see how mothering and creative careers are not easily reconciled. With no choice but to take her kids to an audition callback, Viv is seen nervously scrunching her face. As we hear her half of a phone conversation, she says she’s “had a morning” and will be late with her two children in tow.
Viv leans into the tension and messiness of mothering, resisting the perfection of a happily ever after. Policy makers should pay close attention to the tension.
In 2016, media coverage calling out a lack of diversity including no nominations for female directors at the Academy Awards made us look at the sector’s challenges.
Women in Australia’s screen industry find it difficult to juggle their working lives with their caring roles.
According to 2023 figures from Screen Australia, only 28% of new Australian titles were directed by women, and just 20% were written by women only.
Unique challenges
Mothers who are also creators face both similar and unique structural and cultural challenges.
For many women, idealised “good mother” norms pressure women to conform to particular standards. Women are judged against this “good mother” standard, and, indeed, judge themselves.
For mothers who are also artists, these judgements contribute to role conflicts where they struggle to find both space and time for creative work alongside mothering. Some mothers contemplate giving up on their creative identity altogether.
For all mothers, care costs and responsibilities can be privately and individually borne, hidden from view of employers, screen producers, agents and even other family members.
In the creative industries, these complexities are further amplified.
Work often consists of long hours with unpredictable work commitments and a lack of flexibility. This is challenging for individuals with caring responsibilities. And work is often spread over non-standard work hours, incompatible with standard hours of childcare centres.
Employment networks in Australian screen industries – for example, project-driven collaboration networks in camera departments – have been found to be male dominated. Women with caring responsibilities have even more difficulty accessing these networks, and therefore more difficulty accessing jobs.
‘Bring the kids’
Collectives such as Hollywood’s Moms-in-Film are empowering female performers to represent their needs as mothers.
Locally, Women in Film and Television Australia (WIFT) have been advocating for gender equity and promoting women’s role in the screen industries since 1982 as WIFT NSW, and launched as a national body in 2018.
Reflecting on the lessons she has learnt, Moms-in-Film founder Matilde Dratwa encourages creators who are mothers to – literally – “just bring the kids. You’re already crashing a party you weren’t invited to […] So bring the kids”.
The labour necessitating change in both creative and other workplaces is still being pushed back onto women and individual mothers. Any genuine change must be accompanied by policy and practice reforms.
Crescendo shows us mothering in the arts should not be an Achilles heel. Rather, it is a powerful creative force that resonates deeply.
Authors: Sheree Gregory, Senior Lecturer Human Resource Management, University of Newcastle
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