The documentary film Play Your Gender was executive-produced and hosted by award-winning B.C. performing artist Kinnie Starr.
The director was Stephanie Clattenburg (also the director of the drama Suicide At the Gun Range and the sci-fi short Play Rewind Play) who is also a musician. The film editor was Sarah Byrne. The production manager was Melani Wood. The producer was Sahar Yousefi. All women, with some men helping out. And that's exactly what the film is about - the rarity of that ratio in show-biz.
Together with a team of filmmakers and writers, they dove into the music industry they knew so well with their lenses focused on a question. Why, they wondered, was half the general population female but only a sliver of the mega-billions music industry the domain of women?
"Researchers looked at 600 popular songs based on Billboard charts between 2012-2017," said the filmmakers. "They found the artists attached to the tracks were overwhelmingly male -- 22 percent were women. The number dropped even further for key roles behind the scenes, with 12 percent of women being songwriters and only two percent being producers."
Starr, an Aboriginal multimedia artistic phenom, led the way. She is a rapper, singer, instrument player, audio technician, music producer, poet, prose writer, spoken-word artist and now also an on-camera host. She interviewed a star-studded cast of international music stars, including members of Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, Tegan & Sara and Chantal Kreviazuk.
One of the women (there were several men who spoke to the camera as well on this topic) featured in Play Your Gender is former northern B.C. singer-songwriter Ndidi Onukwulu.
"She's a friend of mine," Starr said. "She and I have been in the same musical circles for a long time. She's doing quite well. She's doing some top-lining (writing musical hooks) and top-lining is really where it's at. If you write a little hook, it gets into, like, 10 per cent of some big star's hit song, then you're really making money. She's a very talented girl and I'm really proud of her for getting into that. Top-lining is a boys club and it's hard to break into. "
Starr said you could name almost any title or job description in the professional music world and the same could be said. Women just aren't in the behind-the-scenes rooms of music power, and part of that is because people avoid groups that appear uninviting or unreflective of themselves. Men have a largely subliminal but partly deliberate monopoly on the song sector.
"I want to see girls in the substructure of music, doing the invisible work," Starr said. "Everywhere you go, it's dudes. And it has an effect of demoralizing or making you feel unstable. A woman has to be a certain type of personality to succeed in an industry that favours men only by virtue of being run by men."
The film is already punching new holes in the old machotocracy. It won the Edith Lando Peace Prize at the 2017 Reel to Real International Film Festival for Youth in Vancouver, it won the Best Art/Music Doc award at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and it spawned the Play Your Gender blog on the Tumblr web platform.
It has not yet screened in Prince George.
