Radio/Television/Film senior Rachel Wolther noticed something strange about the Northwestern film community last winter.

“Women weren’t making movies at Northwestern,” Wolther said.

Although the RTVF department is 58 percent female, very few women were directing larger projects, Wolther said.

So she founded the Northwestern Women Filmmakers Alliance (formerly the Northwestern Women Filmmakers Association) during Winter Quarter 2006. From its conception, the NWFA set out to spark conversation and affect change in Northwestern’s RTVF community.

“Our mission statement is to encourage women in the film and media arts,” Wolther said. “[We want] to nurture them and to give them confidence to, at the university level, direct their own movies, and to pitch their ideas, and to lead others.”

The NWFA consists of 20 members, 18 female and two male.

“You don’t have to be a woman to enjoy the NWFA,” said RTVF sophomore and NWFA fundraising chair Jason Klorfein. “It’s a great learning environment… And there’s a diversity of programming, which is nice.”

The group sponsored a three-part workshop series called “Intro to Filmmaking.” While the executive board is predominantly female, the attendance at NWFA events is “evenly split,” according to Wolther.

“We talk about the logistics of taking an idea through to a script, through to production, and through to post production—coming out with a movie, getting it shown,” Wolther said.

The group’s faculty adviser, Deb Tolchinsky, said she’s enthusiastic about the group and its potential.

“It’s great to have a student-initiated group at NU devoted to promoting women’s involvement in media making,” Tolchinsky said. “One of my former students, Sarah Cortese, was awarded one of [NWFA's] first grants and created a fabulous short animation about the unraveling of memory as one ages. After seeing Sarah’s piece, I anxiously await the next batch of films.”

Wolther said that few women get involved in films not because they’re oppressed, but rather because of gender attitudes that persist in the RTVF community.

When the NWFA was founded, “A lot of people were like ‘Why?’” said RTVF senior and former Undergraduate Radio/Television/Film Student Association co-chair Jackie Doherty.

“Nobody had really thought that women were being oppressed here because they’re not,” Doherty said. “No one’s stopping anyone from doing anything.”

Here, oppression is more indirect, Doherty said. She said that filmmaking’s technical aspects discourage women.

“If [women] are in leadership roles, they’re usually producing films,” Doherty said. “They are often doing things like art direction and production design, and they’re not nearly as strongly represented in areas of technical things like sound design and camera.”

Doherty said this aversion to technical roles begins in the classroom.

“If there are 15 kids that are in a class together, and they’re in a lab, and there’s three cameras, it’s most likely that the people who will actually get up and walk over to the camera and play with all the buttons are the guys,” Doherty said. “And then all the guys are standing around the camera and all the girls feel intimidated. Women end up stopping themselves from joining in.”

But Sarah Hayden, NWFA’s treasurer and RTVF junior, disagrees with Doherty.

“Sure, there aren’t a lot of women actually gaffing or gripping, but being producer or a production designer is just as important,” Hayden said. “If women are intimidated by the equipment, which some are, they just need to become more familiar with it. If you know your shit, it’ll shine through, male or female.”

But both Wolther and Doherty contend that the structure and classification of RTVF classes may perpetuate anti-female attitudes.

In Doherty’s first upper-level production class at Northwestern, only one-third of the class was female. At the time, that proportion was much larger than normal. But production classes were recently renamed and reformatted, which Doherty said has helped equalize the gender ratio.

“Classes have become a lot less defined by the actual technology,” Doherty said. “There are classes about a specific theory. There’s a documentary production class that started, there are classes about experimental media, there’s animation classes. Whereas before there was more of ‘Film Production’ or ‘Video Production’ or ‘Sound Production.’”

While the gender gap in upper-level production classes may be closing, few women pitch to film grant organizations like Studio 22, Wolther and Doherty said.

“I find that a woman, a student, who has a good script and who would like to make this film [doesn’t have] the confidence in themselves to ask someone for $7,000,” Wolther said. “And then there’s no one telling her to go for it anyway. Whereas dudes will just be like ‘Fuck it! I think I can make this movie! Let’s do it!’”

Doherty won one of the Studio 22 grants last year and made a short film called “Ultimate Dino Remix 2005.” A documentary called “Dinos and Lesbians,” directed by RTVF senior Stacy Peterson, accompanied the project .

“Dinos and Lesbians” documents the making of “Remix,” and examines Doherty’s role as a female director on set. It also explores female involvement in both the Northwestern film community and film as a whole.

The documentary features interviews with both Wolther and Doherty, as well as 2006 RTVF graduate and fellow Studio 22 grant winner Kyle Smith, and RTVF junior and Studio 22 board member Shannon Camperson.

“The [Studio 22] Board is not at all hostile, I think, to a woman in a leadership role,” Camperson said. “Our board at least tried to embrace that idea as much as possible.”

From the beginning, however, Camperson said it was difficult being a woman on a male-dominated board and in a male-dominated community.

“Being a woman in Studio 22, or in the film program in general, is extremely intimidating,” Camperson said in the documentary. “The first impression that I got was you either have to be a man or surround yourself with men in order to assert power.”

“Dinos and Lesbians” portrays Doherty as a role model for women in the Northwestern RTVF community.

“The most important way to affect people’s minds is to show them something different,” Doherty said. “And show them enough different things that it’s not different anymore.”

Wolther and Doherty agree that the NWFA has already made an impact in the Northwestern RTVF community by sparking conversation and possibly eliciting change. Wolther said that Doherty deserves a lot of the credit.

“I definitely think Jackie has been a role model to a lot of younger students, especially female students. I’m hoping that they’ll inspire freshmen and suddenly it’ll just become more progressive,” said Wolther in the documentary. “And then the only problem will be when we graduate and go to Hollywood and try and to make real movies then we’ll have to start a new battle.”