Barnard will once again be welcoming and honoring women in the film industry at its Athena Film Festival.
The festival committee announced last Tuesday that the event will take place the weekend of Feb. 8. It will feature over 30 films and will include question-and-answer sessions with directors, producers, actresses, and writers.
“This year’s lineup is a diverse lot from numerous countries in multiple languages: women firefighters and aviators; women who made peace, who made music, and who used their ‘naked power’ to stand up to injustice,” said Kathryn Kolbert, cofounder of the festival and director of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard.
Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein, the festival’s artistic director, chose the nominees and award winners among a pool of over 200 films in an open submission process.
When looking at applications, Kolbert said that they selected entries that would “encourage discussions about leadership.”
One such film is “The Whistleblower,” starring Rachel Weisz,, which follows the experiences of Kathryn Bolkovac, a peacekeeper in Bosnia who exposed a sex scandal in the U.N. to the world.
Another film, “The Lady,” tells the story of pro-democracy Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi. For Kolbert, however, the main goal of the festival is to showcase not only the women in the films, but also those behind the camera.
“Too often, what have been missing are the stories of women as change agents,” Kolbert said. “The Athena Film Festival fills that void by illuminating the stories of women leaders and the filmmakers who bring those stories to life.”
This year, the festival will debut the Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement Award, commemorating Ziskin—producer of hits like “Pretty Woman” and “As Good As It Gets”—who died of breast cancer last June. In the future, the award will recognize a female trailblazer in the film industry.
“Laura Ziskin was the rare Hollywood producer who broke into the ‘Old Boys Club’ but never forgot her roots,” said Kolbert. “The Ziskin Award will be given to women in the film industry whose leadership demonstrates vision and courage, and sets a standard for other women to emulate.”
Ziskin’s daughter, Julia Barry, will accept the award on her mother’s behalf. Other awardees include Rachael Horovitz, producer of “Moneyball,” and Broadway director Julie Taymor, who is known for her work on “The Lion King” and “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”
Only in its second year, the festival has already made some improvements for this year’s showing, according to Kolbert.
“We will be screening more films and have added several sneak peeks at films that have not been completed,” she said. Audiences will get an early look at “Ann Richards’ Texas,” directed by Keith Patterson and Jack Lofton, as well as “Half the Sky,” directed by Maro Chermayeff.
Even the list of organizers is more star studded, with Oscar-winning writer Diablo Cody and renowned Indian director Mira Nair as festival co-chairs.
“We have been inspired as we watched so many extraordinary films about courageous women,” Silverstein said. “We hope the festival will encourage more filmmakers to tell these remarkable stories.”
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