The Purple Meridians – The Purple Meridians

Five meridians are drawn on the map between Barcelona (Spain) and Turin (Italy). A person walking from Turin to Diyarbakır (Turkey) would cross thirty-five more. Three cities and countries distant in space yet sharing the desire for a fairer distribution of opportunities for women and non-binary people in the film industry.

As part of three organisations from these cities, The Observatori de Vídeo No Identificat (Spain), Streeen.org (Italy) and Rosa Kadın Derneği (Turkey), we decided to respond to that desire by creating The Purple Meridians.

The project, sponsored by Eurimages, will bring together 18 filmmakers, 6 from each country, to discuss the hurdles that female-identifying professionals face in the industry, share tools and advice for pre-production, production and distribution, and create a network for future collaborations.

The Purple Meridians are geographical and symbolical coordinates.

A Geographical Meridian refers to the divide between the North-West of Europe, where a higher percentage of female directors speak of a relatively more balanced system and the countries in the Southern countries, where the numbers are significantly worse. While gender obviously does not translate into a genre, the debate on the possibilities of a feminine, or better, of a non male and heteronormative gaze is still extremely topical, even when the filmmakers do not set out to investigate gender-related topics.

In this sense, a Conceptual Meridian charts two equality important priorities: on the one hand, the full recognition of movies that tackle aspects relative to gender equality as socially and culturally relevant, on the other, securing access for women filmmakers to jobs in productions (and genres) that are still almost completely dominated by men.