Zehavit Sabag, Israeli film director, (screen)writer and producer. You made a short film Yes and No which was accepted at The Barcelona International LGBT-film festival this July and in this year's anniversary programme of the 30th Paris International Lesbian and Feminist Film Festival in October. What inspired you to write, produce and direct this short film with a contradictory title? What inspired me in this specific story is interesting because it’s the first experimental short I ever did or write and the original script was even more artistic than the final result. I think the main inspiration is my trying to bring fantasia and realty together, and the conflict that love has for good and bad in both worlds. Two years ago you made short film "She and I" with the same actresses and it was also screened at The Barcelona International LGBT-film festival. It is a really nice idea of how to present what happens when we have been in love (how mind, body and heart differently react to love). What inspired you to make that short film? I wrote that script when I was dealing with broken heart and was in the healing process. and that short was my closer with that love. Do you think that sexual orientation of the actres(ess) matter(s) in lesbian-storylines the same as it matters that transgender actors/actresses play in transgender storylines? I think that it matters and not as matter. There is a thing when an actor or actress comes out, suddenly they get only gay parts in movies and television and I don't like the fact that just because they come out as gay they should only play LGBTQ roles. I think that actors should play a diversity of characters with the right and authentic direction and connection to the character. How is a lesbian scene in Israel, we all assume Israel is pretty liberal when it comes to LGBT-rights and Pride is held each year in Tel Aviv; how is the actual climate regarding LGBT-people in Israel and also making LGBT-films: are LGBT-people accepted or tolerated, are there many lesbian-gay bars, discos, LGBT-film festivals and events or there is a shortage of them? What regarding equality marriage, adoption of children and just in general LGBT-rights as humans rights? Yes. we have an amazing pride parade in Tel Aviv and it’s getting bigger and bigger each year. I think that we have a lot of indie LGBTQ short and feature films here and every year we have the TLVFEST INTERNATIONAL LGBT FILM FESTIVAL that helds place in Tel aviv. Freedom, justice and tolerance should be the pillars of any society. We believe Israel must guarantee full social and political equality to all, regardless of religion, race, sex or sexual orientation. As committed members of the Israeli LGBT community, we struggle for equality and respect by creating a serious, often controversial discourse through the medium of queer cinema. The Tel Aviv International LGBT film festival is the manifestation of this struggle. The only LGBT film festival in the Middle East, TLVFest is a fixture of Tel Aviv pride week. MovieMaker Magazine chooses TLVFest to one of the 25 Coolest 2018 Film Festivals in the World. Selected twice (2014 & 2015) by INDIEWIRE as one of the 10 LGBT film festivals not to be missed, the festival offers a fascinating look into international and Israeli queer cinematic art. It is also an industry hub of activity. We take pride in the many collaborations and creative work that evolved from TLVFest meet-ups, seminars and workshops over the past decade. What is it with Jewish lesbian-love stories in connection with Orthodox religion? In 2007 we watched an excellent lesbian-themed film The Secrets (Ha-Sodot) and last year Disobedience both dealing with lesbians and their love stories in oppressive orthodox Jewish community. What is your perspective on these two stories? How do you see religion in (dis)connection to lesbian love in nowadays Israel? Both of them are very good films with a strong impact. I think it’s important to show the minority communities inside a community, especially when it comes to religion. It’s two thing that are connected to each other and people aren't talking about it enough, therefrom when a movie like this comes out it makes such a big impact. We need more such stories so people can relate to and understand better and to realize that love is love, and love has no boundaries or one god or rules. love is love, simple as that. Do you think that lesbian love story and its main characters should portray certain important values, such as goodness, fairness, honesty, truthfulness and story to have either moral, political, philosophical message and/or background? Yes but not only. lesbian, gay, straight, trans, non-binary etc... have all types of feelings and dark sides. It’s more than important to show characters and not only the important values, such as goodness and honesty ... What is your next film project and most importantly what is your inspiration, where do you get your stories? My next project is a story about a mother-daughter relationship, and the process that they are going through together as they both dealing with the daughter’s coming out. I’m also working on a Youtube channel named PUSSTHEMA which contains all women-all feminist-lesbian-bi-queer content, written and directed by and for women so I’m looking forward to it as well. My inspiration is my everyday life, my life experience, I’m looking for stories in the little details in life.
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I first noticed your article on AE about “9 Tips for Straight Actresses Who Want to Play Gay” and there is a similar article “Here’s How TV Can Win Gay and Lesbian Viewers’ Trust.” I have watched really a lot of lesbian films and TV shows and I couldn't agree more with all you wrote. What inspired you to write it? I have a three-fold purpose with my articles: to influence, educate, and inform. Pieces like “Here’s How TV Can Win Gay and Lesbian Viewers’ Trust” are intended to influence the entertainment industry to have more LGBT representation. In essence, these articles seek to use compelling data and evidence to persuade Hollywood that there’s an easily reachable market for LGBT content, and then provide a roadmap for content makers showing them how to reach that market. Pieces like “9 Tips for Straight Actresses…” are intended to educate people within the entertainment industry about the LGBT community: what makes it unique, how to interact with it, etc. And then of course, the informational aspect of articles crosses multiple areas, whether it’s to alert readers to new shows that have good representation or some new trend that’s happening in the pop culture world. Over the last two and a half years, I’ve been purposely building a library of articles that is intended to act as an easy reference for people in the entertainment industry who want to educate themselves more about LGBT issues but wouldn’t even necessarily know what questions to ask or where to find their answers. Specifically regarding the “9 Tips” piece, I’ve found there’s a tendency among heterosexual actresses to take an LGBT role without doing adequate—or in fact any—study of the LGBT community. I often hear actresses say things like, “Gay and straight people are no different; love is love.” I, personally, would argue that’s an oversimplification on their part that misunderstands and minimizes the uniqueness of the LGBT experience. One of the things about being LGBT that I don’t think is well understood by straight people is that it can be a primary identity for LGBT individuals. For heterosexuals, sexual orientation is like being right-handed: something so natural and common that they don’t think about it as a facet of their identity. But that’s not the case for most LGBT individuals. The LGBT community is a minority community that has a very specific set of experiences and worldviews that merit exploration and preparation the same way that an able-bodied actor would do background research on playing someone with a disability. I really love how you frequently use statistics in your articles to point out the important facts, recently in the article 'Latin American Markets are the Future of Lesbian TV Characters'. This article is a nice example of how to fight with stereotypes and prejudices regarding female homosexuality in certain parts of the world. Can you tell us why you frequently use statistics to write articles on lesbian representation and what do you wish to achieve with it, do you think article contain stronger message when there are figures behind? Several years ago, in a movie called “Moneyball,” there was a scene in which a group of old men sit at a table discussing baseball players that they’re considering recruiting for a professional baseball team. The men are using subjective and often flawed ideas on which to base their decisions, things like, “His girlfriend is ugly, so he must have low self-esteem. He won’t do well as a professional baseball player.” Then the young man in the room, who has studied statistics, presents a rigorous statistical analysis for each player, arguing that the recruiters need to base their decisions on data in order to get the best results. The team moves from using subjective feelings to objective information, and as a result the team starts to perform very, very well. This is a true story, by the way, of the Oakland Athletics baseball team in 2002. The point is: numbers can sometimes tell us a truth that is otherwise hidden. Before 2016, many of us in the LGBT community recognized that lesbian and bisexual characters were consistently being killed off of TV shows, but it wasn’t until someone put together charts and figures proving that the actual number was around 25-30% of all characters ever on American TV, and that this rate was five times higher than the rate at which heterosexual characters were being killed, that Hollywood actually paid attention to the problem. Numbers have tremendous power because they move the conversation from the realm of qualitative (“feelings”) to quantitative (“evidence”). The Latin American markets piece was absolutely about using numbers to tell a story that was otherwise invisible, and in that case numbers were able to tell an immensely more persuasive story than would otherwise have been told using words alone. So I have a great affinity for statistics and metrics because I believe they add a lot of weight to arguments. Lastly, the other reason that I use numbers so frequently in my articles is because numbers are the language of the entertainment industry. For example, the producers of a TV show might not be moved by the argument that adding a lesbian or bisexual character is a morally commendable and socially progressive thing to do, but if I can prove that having these types of characters will have a measurable impact on the show’s viewership numbers, which equates to profit for the company, that’s when Hollywood starts to listen. And I use “Hollywood” as a metonym for the entertainment industry in general. This same argument can be applied in the UK, Argentina, India, or wherever. I myself 'strongly vote' for the happy ending lesbian storylines and wrote an article about the importance of happy lesbian love stories by using knowledge about (mostly philosophical) concepts of love through Western history... therefore I also love your articles on Happy Ending Project where it is shown your extensive knowledge on portrayal of lesbians in soap operas throughout the world. Do you think there are differences in lesbian story telling in American, European, Australian and Latin American films, TV-shows and soap operas regarding happy lesbian love stories and in general regarding contents, form and media representation, if yes how? I would say that in my opinion there isn’t a difference in how stories are told around the world. In this sense, love and love stories are universal, and that’s why “Romeo and Juliet” is performed time and again the world over. Nor is there even much difference in the presentation, given that much of the world takes its inspiration from how Hollywood frames its storytelling. What has surprised me, on the other hand, is how many non-Anglo (US, UK, Canada) storylines have had happy endings, and I think that is a reflection of efforts by content makers in these countries, specifically in Latin America, to shape the reactions of their audiences to homosexuality to be more accepting and positive. In which ways representation of lesbians in films and TV-series changed in the course of four decades and have we achieved goal of the equal representation of straight and lesbian characters yet? Can you give us five examples of positive change in films, TV and soap operas and explain why they can serve as good examples? What do you think still needs to be done? Obviously, representation in the United States has changed dramatically in the last four decades, and the entertainment industry is doing much better by all measures both qualitative and quantitative. In the 1990s, one might have seen just three lesbian characters on all of American TV in a single year and one character in a movie. There was almost no representation at all. Then as more lesbian and bisexual characters—most of whom were on TV—were introduced, we started to see the “evil/crazy bisexual woman” trope. Hollywood moved away from that trope within a few years—I’d like to believe in large part due to websites like AfterEllen highlighting how toxic the trope was—and instituted in its place the “lesbians have sad endings” trope. Now we’re at a point where TV shows are adding so many more LGBT characters that it can be hard to keep track of them all, a situation that twenty years before would have been unfathomable. On the other hand, American movies have a long way to go to catch up. Progress has largely remained stagnant in terms of the numbers of LGBT characters introduced each year despite pushes by groups like GLAAD and websites like AfterEllen and Autostraddle for increased representation. Of course, for both movies and TV we can’t talk about parity between straight and lesbian characters; it’s just not there. The amount of screen time, the amount of physical intimacy, these are tangible metrics that can easily be used to prove the inequality. But the first step for all of this is more characters in general. US TV may be doing better, but what about Canadian TV or German movies? We’re a global community, and progress can’t be limited to just a few Western countries. Progress must happen everywhere. The five examples that I would highlight showing progress on LGBT representation would be:
Do you think it is important that lesbian actresses play lesbian roles the same as it is important that transgender roles are played by transgender actors/actresses? I think that’s a very difficult question. LGBT actors are constantly being discriminated against, whether overtly or covertly, and that needs to change, first and foremost. To me personally, the problem is not casting someone who is cisgender to play someone who is transgender or casting a straight woman to play a lesbian, the problem is never casting the transgender or lesbian actors to play anything. To deny minorities the chance to represent even themselves on screen and have the majority take those and all other roles is the height of privilege. As a result, in the case of transgender actors, so long as Hollywood won’t cast them in cisgender parts, then I think absolutely they should have priority on transgender parts. For lesbians, I think it’s perhaps slightly less essential to give priority on lesbian parts because they’ve had some success at winning heterosexual roles. But ultimately, the real need here is for LGBT actors to have an equal chance to get any role, whether that role is cis-, trans-, straight, or gay. What is it in lesbian community with so called 'lipstick or feminine lesbians'? I have noticed a lot of prejudices and stereotypes regarding them. Do you think that we 'need' to associate them predominantly with heterosexuality and male gaze? I can only answer that question as it relates to representation on screen. Hollywood does an awful job of showing the great diversity of gender expression that we have in the LGBT community. In Hollywood, 98% of lesbian characters are high femme/lipstick lesbians and the remaining 2% fall somewhere further long the butch scale. That said, this is really just a reflection of Hollywood’s perpetual objectification of all women, regardless of sexual orientation. Hollywood seems to think that the only women worth putting on screen are the ones in mascara, lipstick, and dresses. I do think this limited view of what is “feminine” caters to male viewers—the male gaze—and it unfairly cheats female viewers of all orientations of a realistic depiction of who they are. What is your next project: what do you hope to achieve with it and what inspires you the most? My current pet project and future article is looking at the voices of influence in the LGBT pop culture community. Who are our thought leaders? Who drive analysis of trends in a way that has real impact? If I’d been trained as a data scientist, I would have done social network analysis and come up with more concretely backed data, but since I don’t have that training and knowledge, I’m asking pop culture commentators whom I know for their opinions and trying to use that anecdotally-based evidence to reach a conclusion. Mapping out this sort of understanding of our community is important to me to help me understand the intellectual parameters of our community. I often view what happens in pop culture as a barometer for the health of a community, so if I can find what voices have impact, I hope to be able to track what issues are affecting us most and where we see ourselves going. I like to stay busy and always have several projects on which I’m working, so I’m also finishing writing part two of a young adult fantasy fiction duology. Growing up, there weren’t many books that featured queer female protagonists, much less young adult protagonists in the fantasy genre, so it’s important to me to contribute to the community, so that young women today will be able to read stories that speak to their own experience and give them role models to follow. Ultimately, I’m inspired—or a better word would be “driven”—by the desire to make change. I’ve always been a believer in the LGBT community and in the need to make the world better for my community, however possible. Everything I write is an effort to improve things in one way or another, pushing at the margins and trying to create incremental change that could one day have much greater effects. Although it’s very, very hard to see the impact of what I write, I keep faith that in some way, I’m making life better for the people around me. Interviews with women in film industry, research institutes, art organizations ...Archives
July 2023
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