PARK CITY, UTAH — The timing couldn’t be more perfect: Just one week after the shocking Oscar snub of “Zero Dark Thirty” director Kathryn Bigelow, female directors marched into the Sundance Film Festival in record numbers.
For the first time in the history of Sundance, which opened last night, women directors have caught up to men in the main category, the US Dramatic Competition, which this year features 16 titles, eight by women. The Premiere category, which brings in new work by established filmmakers, highlights the work of several more women directors — including “The Piano” director Jane Campion, who co-directed a seven-hour film (!) debuting Sunday, a dark mystery called “Top of the Lake.” (Don’t expect lots of laughs.)
“I love the fact that there’s actual gender parity instead of just the token ‘girl,’ ” says Jill Soloway, writer-director of “Afternoon Delight.” It’s a dark comedy about what happens when a housewife tries to save a stripper — by inviting her to be the live-in nanny. (Says Soloway, “a friend explained that men know you don’t bring strippers home, but women don’t.”)
This year’s breakthrough is “what women have waited for forever, a base of true equality,” says Soloway, a former writer for “Six Feet Under” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” “Now it feels like there really is a level playing field.”
Says another woman director, Cherien Dabis, who was tapped to open the fest with her wedding comedy-drama “May in the Summer”: “When I was here in 2009, there were two women directors in the Dramatic Competition.”
Adds Dabis, “I feel that in the last several years, women’s stories have really come to the forefront.”
In an environment where “The Help” and “Bridesmaids” — films Variety calls “femme-friendly projects — proved to be blockbusters, Soloway is optimistic. “In every area, especially in the past year, with things like ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and [“The Mindy Project” creator] Mindy Kaling and Kristen Wiig and Amy Poehler — it just feels like it would be a really weird time to be a guy. I’d be a little bit pissed if I was a guy.”
Other films helmed by women debuting in the main category at Sundance 2013 include “Concussion,” Stacie Passon’s sexysounding project about a woman who sustains a blow to the head and decides to become a hooker, and actress Lake Bell’s “In a World . . .” Bell, who played Alec Baldwin’s hottie wife in “It’s Complicated,” wrote and directed and stars in the film, about a young woman who seeks to follow in the footsteps of her dad, the greatest movie-trailer voice-over artist.
Jerusha Hess, the 32-year-old wife of Jared Hess, with whom she co-wrote “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Nacho Libre,” strikes out on her own with her directorial debut, “Austenland.” Produced by “Twilight” author Stephenie Meyer, it’s a romp based on the novel about a trip to a Jane Austen theme park by an American (Keri Russell) who is obsessed with Colin Firth’s portrayal of Mr. Darcy in the 1995 TV adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice.”
The autobiographically inflected motherhood drama “Emanuel and the Truth About Fishes,” written and directed by Francesca Gregorini, is a tale of obsession about a troubled girl who takes an unhealthy interest in the newborn child of her next-door-neighbor, who resembles her dead mother.
Rosemarie DeWitt stars in “Touchy Feely,” a drama by Lynn Shelton (“Humpday”) about a massage therapist who develops a psychological aversion to bodily contact, and in “The Lifeguard,” Kristen Bell plays a journalist who drops her job as a reporter in New York and returns to the house where she grew up in Connecticut.
The latter film’s writer-director, Liz M. Garcia, has been outspoken about the glass ceiling: In a Forbes op-ed, she wrote, “no legislation, no government incentives, no influx of female-centered films, no female studio execs . . . can change a basic fact that haunts me: women don’t look like directors. Equality in Hollywood will not arrive until we admit that we have ideas of what a leader looks like. And he doesn’t look like me.”
Soloway has a slightly different take: “I don’t feel like there’s anybody who makes it hard for women to compete. I think it’s more a case of, you have to have so much drive and passion to be a director. I’m just not positive that there are as many women like that.”