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Lifetime’s New Broad Focus Initiative Offers Women New Opportunities in Film

Sisters are doin' it for themselves.

The current trend of women getting tired of Hollywood’s shit and doubling down on diversity continues with Lifetime’s new Broad Focus initiative. Besides the campaign’s… interesting play on words, it’s designed to “provide women with more opportunities to write, develop, produce, and direct content.”

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It’s true that Hollywood still has a problem providing equal opportunities to women, as illustrated by Anna Kendrick’s incredibly eloquent interview with Glamour. She’s joined by the likes of Carey Mulligan, Rose Byrne, and Geena Davis in their increasing fed-up-ness with Hollywood.

The great thing is that Lifetime isn’t alone in creating new initiatives and campaigns to highlight women’s contributions to film. My Queen And Yours, Meryl Streep, also established The Writer’s Lab to bring together 8 female screenwriters over 40 to work together and create new projects. Rose Byrne also went ahead and founded a brand new all-female production company called “The Dollhouse Collective.”

In a statement to Variety, A&E Networks’ (Lifetime’s parent company) president and CEO, Nancy Dubuc said:

In this day in age, it’s hard to believe as an industry we still struggle to fully recognize women’s talents in behind-the-camera roles, especially as directors. Our company invests heavily in finding fresh, unique voices and Broad Focus will inspire us to look deeper and in nontraditional places to discover women among those storytellers. I’m proud we are challenging ourselves and our friends in the industry to do more to support them.

Check out the video, featuring clips from interviews with Jennifer Aniston, Queen Latifah, Demi Moore, and Eva Longoria.

(via Variety)

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Jessica Lachenal
Jessica Lachenal is a writer who doesn’t talk about herself a lot, so she isn’t quite sure how biographical info panels should work. But here we go anyway. She's the Weekend Editor for The Mary Sue, a Contributing Writer for The Bold Italic (thebolditalic.com), and a Staff Writer for Spinning Platters (spinningplatters.com). She's also been featured in Model View Culture and Frontiers LA magazine, and on Autostraddle. She hopes this has been as awkward for you as it has been for her.

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