#BerlinalePeople: Mariam Zaidi, Breakthroughs Film Festival

The Berlinale is one of the major festivals striving for gender parity in its programming and structural approaches. What does gender equality mean in your job, your festival, your career, your community? And what remains the biggest challenge for now?
Contributing to work that enhances gender equality in the industry has been a primary focus of my career in film festival leadership and programming for the past decade. Diversity and gender parity are crucial, not just to the filmmaking process, but to all of the infrastructures that support the development, exhibition, and recognition of films if we want our global cinema to accurately reflect the experiences and perspectives of the societies we live in. Recent efforts to correct this have resulted in increased employment rates of women in the film industry. However, most of their roles still stay below the line where most directors, producers, and executives identify as men.

For the past few years, I have been fortunate to lead a team of passionate advocates at the Breakthroughs Film Festival, the only festival in Canada that exclusively showcases and supports short films made by emerging women and non-binary directors. Creating a space where the spotlight remains on emerging filmmakers and their short films (often their first films) has really shown me what's possible when you create a space where shorts are not tacked on to feature presentations but are the main attraction. We don't have to crunch numbers to make sure most of our selected films aren't directed by men because we're a film festival that serves everyone else. Building community and finding peers and mentors within a safe space where your work is celebrated and recognized has been an empowering experience for the filmmakers at BFF. We aspire towards an industry where watching films by women and other marginalized genders are entirely ordinary and mainstream.

We're definitely making progress, but I think some of the biggest challenges are recognizing that not all women face barriers to the industry in the same way. Race, gender expression, disability, cultural background, and class all play an equal role in someone's ability to access opportunities. We need to allow more women in leadership roles on film sets and at the helm of funding bodies. We need to make sure more people with these intersecting identities are in positions of decision-making power.

Why is Berlinale (market) access important for your work?
As a film festival programmer and director, having access to the Berlinale Market is a fantastic privilege. It's well-known as an incredible hub for industry professionals worldwide and very much a market of opportunities that includes financiers, producers, co-production agents, and distributors. Although the pandemic has made things challenging for filmmakers and the global industry, participating in the market via this online platform is the only way I could have attended this year. This access promises to catapult my learning and networking opportunities within the span of a short and jam-packed week.

I'm looking forward to watching and scouting films, particularly those by first-time filmmakers and directed/produced by women. Programmers of color in North America are in the minority. I firmly believe our presence in these spaces to watch, critique, and champion films from our unique experiences and world-views is a massive advantage for us but also for the filmmaking industry at large when we're considering how to better improve access and opportunity for underrepresented filmmakers.

If I were physically in Berlin, I would …
... be elated! I have only been to Berlin once before, and it's easily one of the most electric and inspiring cities I've ever visited in my adult life, and I cannot wait to go back one day. It would have been a whole other level of thrilling to be there for the festival in person this year and really immerse myself in the experience. Nothing can truly replace the energy and excitement of being at a festival, all of the relationships you're able to build in a short period, the films that surprise you when you walk into something spontaneously, meeting people from halfway across the world, etc.

Although we miss that sorely it's hard to overstate the lack of accessibility in many festival spaces where speed and frequent movement from one arena to the next are expected. I am glad films and industry opportunities have been made accessible to people who ordinarily would not have traveled to the festival and those who generally find the pace and physical limitations of screening and industry spaces challenging to navigate.

I look forward to a new era of film festivals when we're able to gather again and where we retain some of the accessibility we've been able to provide while still celebrating cinema together in person.

It will have been a good Berlinale market experience 2021 for me when …
... I could find a few great films by emerging filmmakers as I love finding and tracking new voices in cinema. My background is in documentary filmmaking, so I'm definitely keeping an eye out for the documentaries in the program and learning more about the new and returning filmmakers participating. I'm also excited to see some familiar Canadian filmmakers in the Berlinale Talents cohort this year and looking forward to learning more about their projects and tracking their progress.

Favourite German film of all times:
That is such an impossible question to answer! I don't think I have one favorite film of all time. As a lover of short films and always on the lookout for films by women directors with distinct directorial styles, I'd love to mention a really arresting short film I saw that stayed with me for a long time: Entire Days Together by Louise Donschen. It's about growing up as a teenager with a disability and the anxiety that one can feel being extricated from a familiar environment into a new phase of life where belonging and familiarity are far from guaranteed. I was impressed with Donschen's take on a coming-of-age film that centers the experience of someone with a disability and compassionately frames them in quiet, pensive moments with a precise attention to the sensory details that define the main character’s world.

interview by Jutta Brendemühl


Mariam Zaidi is a South Asian filmmaker, film programmer and arts manager based in Toronto, Canada. Zaidi currently holds the position of Associate Programmer at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and Executive Director at the Breakthroughs Film Festival.

EFM Online Market Badge Inclusion Initiative

Supported by the Goethe-Institut and the EFM, this new program, spearheaded by the EFM’s Diversity & Inclusion initiative, aims at creating outreach and greater pathways into the market and the film industry at large for underrepresented and marginalized film professionals from across the globe. Through this new programme, a total of 120 online market badges will be awarded to organizations, collectives and institutions who represent and advocate for marginalized and global south film professional with the overarching aim of contributing to a more inclusive film business and a more equal playing field for all.


image courtesy Mariam Zaidi: Zaidi presenting at Breakthroughs Film Festival, 2018. Photograph by Jocelyn Reynolds.