Thank you for your comment. We appreciate you taking the time to engage seriously with the piece.

We are not entirely convinced by the comparison. Yes, there have long been female stereotypes in cinema: submissive women, ornamental roles, one-dimensional love interests. That is true. But cinema has also given us many strong, intelligent, capable female characters for decades, long before the current ideological moment. Princess Leia in Star Wars (1977), Ripley in Alien and Aliens, and Sarah Connor in The Terminator are obvious examples.

More importantly, our point is not simply about whether a gender was ever portrayed badly on screen. The real issue is institutional incentive. We do not believe films were historically selected for major awards, promoted, or culturally protected because they humiliated women or diminished female competence as part of an approved ideological framework. That is a different phenomenon.

What concerns us today is not the existence of flawed male characters, which has always been part of storytelling, but the repeated cultural reward for narratives that diminish men as a class, erase male-female cooperation, or treat male disposability as sophistication. That is what we are examining.

So while we understand the historical point you are making, we do not think it is fully parallel to what is happening now.

We feel less alone knowing this.

Thanks

https://variety.com/2025/film/festivals/cannes-critics-week-next-step-studio-indonesia-1236558526/

I told you so. New name. Same game.

What did I tell you six months ago! They’re not even trying to hide anymore. Don’t be surprised if most of the filmmakers selected for this end up co-producing with either Welinski or Bhara in the future. Cannes is a joke!

Thank you for your comment. First – women’s perspectives absolutely belong on screen, full stop. The critique isn’t “don’t let women shine.” It’s that too many buzzy titles get there by flattening men into predators, cowards, or punchlines. That shortcut doesn’t make women stronger; it just swaps one cartoon for another.

Second, strength doesn’t require a foil made of straw. Women can be powerful, complicated leads without the men around them being uniformly weak or vile. When movies treat “masculinity” itself as the problem, stories shrink: women become symbols, men become case studies.

Third, complexity is the real win. Let women be brilliant, wrong, tender, ruthless full spectrum human. Let men be the same. We can call out genuine harm (and we should) without turning half the human race into set dressing for a thesis. If the only way a film knows to elevate women is to humiliate men, it’s admitting it doesn’t trust its own heroine.

No one’s asking to “polish men’s armor.” We’re asking for better writing: stories where women shine as themselves and where male characters aren’t sanded down to a single, tedious note. That’s not protecting feelings, that’s protecting cinema.

True that the NYT article may be a lonely voice in the darkness for their org as a whole, but it was a welcomed article that pointed to various reasons and possible solutions to turn this sinking ship around without intentionally enraging/polarizing “influencers” be part of the solution.

Saving this article…soooooo many good data points in it TYVM!

Thank you for your comment. Yes, and as mentioned elsewhere, it seems like this producer is using her power not only to help certain directors (she works with) but allegedly destroy the careers of others.

I have some experience of film industry in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and other ex-Yugoslav countries, as well as in the United Kingdom. Centralized film schools, the same producers sitting on funding boards in different countries, exchanging public funding between themselves making it all look legit – is what goes on over and over again. They then pick these same films for festivals together with sales agents and a possibility of independence is pretty much obliterated. An inconceivable shake-up is needed to break through the layers of nepotism and corruption that have settled over this industry, actually, since the beginning of this century, when the film centers were open, festivals introduced talent and development programmes, and what was supposed to be a heaven for creativity, turned into its opposite. Introducing selection by virtue – which I am not against in principle – has just complicated things and also turned against itself.

The biggest problem is that the films are often total crap, made just to satisfy the form, for people in the industry get their pay across five or six countries that participate, and no wonder people are not going back to cinemas – they sense they are cheated on. In my experience, in the Balkans, theatre is the same, if not worse.

In the 2023 competition, for example, 42% of the selected directors were Black female NYU students and alums. A strange version of social justice when all of those directors went to the same extremely expensive school.

Some other thoughts: there was only one heterosexual male director in competition at Sundance this year, even though probably 60% of the submissions fit that profile. The shorts are likely just as bad, at least the US ones.

A look at the labs will also likely reveal a lot of this, both the NYU stuff and the discrimination.

Thanks!

In the 2023 competition, for example, 42% of the selected directors were Black female NYU students and alums. A strange version of social justice when all of those directors went to the same extremely expensive school.

Some other thoughts: there was only one heterosexual male director in competition at Sundance this year, even though probably 60% of the submissions fit that profile. The shorts are likely just as bad, at least the US ones.

A look at the labs will also likely reveal a lot of this, both the NYU stuff and the discrimination.

Great points! As you know, tall people experience significant advantages in life, which is why many US presidents were taller than average, most CEOs are taller than average, etc. When you say that we should attack “systems”, we should also give short folks some kind of an advantage so they could overcome their “systemic” disadvantage. What about people with bad skin I wonder? And I wonder too, should we demand affirmative action to support white men playing in the NBA or are these systems to be attacked in one direction only? And btw, how many genders are there?

They send their “best” to fight and die on the front lines, and when (if) they make it back, they get clowned on by purple-haired Twitter activists. Absolute clown world

RESPONSE:

Sources for the budget and the critic’s reviews are listed in the article.

The producer’s gross in Greece is approximately €2.30 per ticket, from which the costs of DCPs and advertising must still be deducted. Furthermore, a substantial portion of the ticket price is retained by third parties: the exhibitor’s share (typically around 50%), the distributor’s commission, VAT, and other fees. It’s important to distinguish between total box office gross and the actual net revenue received by the producer per ticket.

In its opening week, VK’s film ranked well behind How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch. By the second week, it had dropped to No. 7 at the box office, continuing to trail significantly behind How to Train Your Dragon, Lilo & Stitch, Mission: Impossible, and 28 Days Later. During its second week, the film sold just 5,000 tickets—approximately 20% fewer than in its debut week.

The article says: “public records do not yet confirm it as a cash recipient of the annual Momo Distribution Grant—only that it is a Momo-backed title.”

Vox Humana was not a recipient of the MOMO Distribution Grant:

https://www.momofilm.co/momo-distribution-grant

https://cinemadedemain.festival-cannes.com/en/2025/focus-copro-2025-three-projects-selected-by-pop-up-film-residency-ecam-industria-hff-munchen/
Arvin Belarmino’s writer and co-director for Agapito.

I have read the comments. They are all correct.
The problem exists. Denying the complaints received by Film Industry Watch is like denying that the sun exists, but there are no names to mention and nothing else to do but look at all the sectors into which human life branches out.
Cinema is a wonderful thing because all those who devote their lives to it are wonderful. Cinema professionals seek, invent, build dreams, descend into hell, go to paradise, investigate the hearts of lions, sheep and hyenas. They flush out hatred and sing of love on its tragic, complex, invisible strings, fragile as tender shoots and light as enchanting zephyrs. In cinema, as in all social sectors, there are men of their time. “Time”, the era, is the lupus in fabula to be investigated, the name to be named, the culprit to be pointed out.
In this era, matches can shine like stars and suns can remain messages in bottles irretrievably lost in stormy oceans. These are times when the categories of “men, little men and quaquaraqquà”, created by the film Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl), are more relevant than ever but… alas, they are no longer easily distinguishable. These are times when neither things nor people of value are recognised as such. They fall into the shapeless cauldron of the quest for mass visibility and affirmation. Without any foothold, they are and remain nobodies. Only the benevolent nod of a patron can perform the miracle of hooking them onto the driving gear. Where I come from, they say, “Without saints, you don’t go to heaven”. In today’s world, what we are discussing here is normal practice and does not only concern the world of cinema but all fields of human knowledge. We can only hope that it is not only small men and quaraqquà who have saints in heaven, and remember that “we need examples that are simple but true, like the imprints of those values that have been handed down through the heroic ages of those who came before us and connected us forever to the sense of our roots”.

Film Industry Watch response:

Who did what:
Gogularaajan Rajendran really is both the editor of Bleat! and one of the eight filmmakers selected for Directors’ Factory 2024 (Philippines edition).

Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan likewise appears in the same Factory line-up (co-directing the short Cold Cut).

His short Vox Humana is officially presented as a Momo Film Co project with Alemberg Ang credited as co-producer; the film is being circulated with Momo’s support, but public records do not yet confirm it as a cash recipient of the annual Momo Distribution Grant—only that it is a Momo-backed title.

RIA (feature debut of Arvin Belarmino) lists Alemberg Ang as producer and Momo Film Co and Dominique Welinski / DW among its co-producers on the Cannes Critics’ Week “Next Step” page, confirming their partnership.

Momo Film Co and Yulia Evina Bhara have previously teamed up on two high-profile festival films:

Don’t Cry, Butterfly – Venice Critics’ Week 2024 winner.

Dreaming & Dying – dual Leopard winner at Locarno 2023.

Bradley Liew (Epicmedia) and DW Productions (Dominique Welinski) are indeed the lead producers of Directors’ Factory 2024.

Renoir (Cannes main competition 2025, dir. Chie Hayakawa) lists both Yulia Evina Bhara and Alemberg Ang among its co-producers in industry press and credit sheets, confirming that the pair now share a feature-length project.

How often they show up:
It’s fair to say that Bhara, Liew, Ang, Momo Film Co and DW crop up repeatedly at major labs and markets—Cinéfondation Résidence, La Fabrique, Locarno Open Doors, Venice Critics’ Week, Quinzaine, etc, and they often collaborate with one another. But they are not the only Southeast-Asian names doing so; filmmakers such as Anthony Chen, Mouly Surya, Phạm Thiên Ân, Woo Ming-Jin and many others appear just as regularly.

Points that were inaccurate or overstated:
Jury leadership. The 2025 Cannes Critics’ Week jury is chaired by Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen; Yulia Evina Bhara sits on the five-person jury but does not lead it.

“Only two SEA films.” This year’s Critics’ Week line-up contains at least two Southeast-Asian features (A Useful Ghost and RIA in development) and one SEA short (Bleat!). So the claim of exclusivity is not accurate.

Award-giving “co-incidence.”

The Critics’ Week Grand Prize went to Thai feature A Useful Ghost, decided collectively by the Sorogoyen-led jury.

The Queer Palm – Short Film (an independent award with its own jury) went to Bleat! not decided by the Critics’ Week jury at all, but not surprising considering all these connections..

Thus, Bhara was involved in the deliberation for A Useful Ghost but had no role in Bleat!’s award, and the prizes were not handed solely to collaborators of hers. But even one jury can easily sway awards in the direction they want, and such a conflict of interest should not exist in the jury at all.

Take-away:

Almost every production link you listed is genuine. The pattern is a tight, increasingly well-networked generation of SEA producers who pool resources across borders; international labs and sidebars actively encourage such clustering and degrade artistic output, let alone access to newcomers. This is another example of the issues that we keep raising, thank you for your contribution!

Source URLs:

https://www.quinzaine-cineastes.fr/en/directors-factory-2024

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleat%21

https://www.semainedelacritique.com/en/edition/2025/movie/bleat

https://www.momofilm.co/short-films/vox-humana

https://www.semainedelacritique.com/en/movie/ria

https://www.momofilm.co/features/ria

https://www.momofilm.co/features/dont-cry-butterfly

https://www.momofilm.co/features/dreaming-dying

https://rollingstonephilippines.com/culture/a-filipino-co-produced-film-is-headed-to-the-cannes-2025-competition-slate/

https://gazettely.com/2025/05/entertainment/renoir-review/

https://www.semainedelacritique.com/en/edition/2025/jury

https://www.nationthailand.com/life/entertainment/40050316

https://hype.my/2025/472879/malaysian-short-film-bleat-wins-queer-palm-award-at-cannes-film-festival-2025/

Yulia Evina Bhara, Bradley Liew, MOMO, Alemberg Ang and DW are frequent collaborators. Year after year these are the only names from SEA which pop up at international labs, markets and festivals.

MOMO and Yulia Evina Bhara worked on the Venice title Don’t Cry Butterfly and Locarno title Dreaming and Dying.

MOMO and Alemberg Ang are working on Ria.

Bradley Liew and DW collaborated on Directors Factory 2024.

Yulia Evina Bhara and Alemberg Ang worked on Renoir in Cannes Main Competition 2025.

That the only two SEA films in Cannes Critics’ Week won awards by a Jury led by Yulia Evina Bhara is no co-incidence. That too by to a producer she has worked with multiple times. It sickens me to the core that there is no fairness even in independent films.

All this information can be verified by looking at their website and social media.

And another one as well. His co-director and co-writer’s project SILIW was selected for Cinema Demain Focus Copro at Cannes 2025

Dear Angela,

Please re-read the article. Since your comment, we have added not one but two updates. We appreciate your engagement and will take your feedback into account as we prepare a set of guidelines we believe festivals should follow, though, as we’ve noted elsewhere, we do not expect these to be respected.

This is not an isolated failure or an unfortunate exception; it is a structural feature of the system. As Foucault observed, power is not merely held or possessed — it circulates, embedded in relationships, institutions, and discourses. In the context of the festival circuit, power manifests not through transparent meritocratic evaluation, but through informal networks of exchange, influence, and symbolic capital (or real capital, bribe, we’re certain that happens too.) Individuals in certain positions convert cultural and social capital into concrete opportunities, often under the guise of fairness or professionalism.

A truly merit-based system would not allow these forms of “soft” power to generate such outsized influence. The current structure actively incentivizes gatekeeping, favor-trading, and performative allyship. These are not aberrations; they are mechanisms by which the system reproduces itself. It is not a bug, it is a feature of the system. In an age where anyone can make a film with a cheap camera or even a mobile phone, it is not only meant to produce power for insiders, but also to protect the system, and the limited resources within its influence (state funding, investors money etc) from outsiders, and ensure that the limited resources are circulating within a small group of insiders.

Your points taken. However, I still feel that a pro-active approach might be more successful.
A.

Oh dear.

Dear Angela,

Ms. Welinski is referenced because she is central to this particular story. How could we write this article without including the names of the persons and films involved? All details included are sourced and part of the public record. Our articles are based on information shared with us by filmmakers who raise concerns about these practices, the email regarding this case is shown above.

We only publish information that we can verify. In this case, it involves Ms. Welinski; tomorrow, it may be someone else. Many of the incidents reported to us are not published precisely because we cannot confirm and source them. We ask that if there is any mistake in this article, or any other, that our readers contact us so such mistakes can be corrected.

However, I take issue with one striking statement from the article: “Please note that this article is not meant to be an ad hominem attack on any specific person.” Starting with your title, and continuing throughout (‘when a person like Welinski’; ‘when a producer like Welinski’), Dominique Welinski is named again and again as the perpetrator of various forms of favoritism. There is even a veiled suggestion that she bad-mouthed an unnamed producer to one of the other judges. If these aren’t examples of ad hominum attacks, I don’t know what is.

Perhaps your efforts ought to be on constructing a proposal for re-organization of the festival’s criteria for judges which would include a stipulation that no judge can be connected in any substantive way to any of the entries. In my humble opinion, that would be far more productive than stirring up a lot of suspicion and bad feelings in our already beleaguered industry.

Look at all the mediocre-talent, at best, children of Hollywood stars now making movies of their own and so many skilled, un-connected, actors and/or writers, like myself, getting squat?! Sad and pathetic.