WOW Festival : a celebration of women winemakers & women entrepreneurs
1st March | 6-9PM | 25th floor The Murray, Hong Kong
Future Leadership - defining your leadership style
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Panel chair : Ms Lori Granito TEDx Coach and award winning entrepreneur
Speakers : Ms Randy Lai - CEO, McDonald's Hong Kong
Mr Nick Marsh - MD, APAC Executive Search
Ms Gina Wong - Filmmaker, founder PUFF & founder of Experimenta
Ms Eliazbeth L. Thomson - Chairwoman, the Women Entrepreneur Network
Ms Xania Wong - CEO, JobDOH
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Share an overview of your career in 5 min.
Hello everyone good evening my name is Gina Wong.
I am a filmmaker and producer and founder of and independent film festival PUFF. I also founded video art collective called Experimenta.
I work and live in three cities : Hong Kong, London and Beijing. I spend roughly one third of my time in each city.
Every late September for the past 10 years, I have been taking holidays in the village of Monthélie in Côte de Beaune of Burgundy with a group of 12 friends. We would drive through the vineyards of La Romanée-Conti and La Tâche; and there is one thing that occur to me is that wine making is very similar to contemporary art. Because almost everywhere we went ( except for one vineyard ) all the owners were men.
You see my first film was a documentary exploring the relationship between property and contemporary art in Shanghai, China. What I found was whoever owns the property gets to decide what kind of art to show. They became the taste makers. Just like who ever owns the land gets to make the wine. They became the winemakers. And in the old days, property rights are passed on to men only.
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I made my first film in 2008. Since then, I have taken part in the production of 8 film projects. My most recent film project is a 90 minute experimental drama called Papagajka. It was a collaboration with Serbian women filmmaker Emma Rozanski. The film was premiered at the SXSW festival 2016 in the United States.
Share your "road to leadership", noting challenges your have faced in your industry.
I am first a filmmaker and producer; so my calling is to lead by breaking the status quo in how a story is told and what kind of story should be told to the world.
We humans navigate this world by stories about our values, cultures and our roles. What if I say the story that you have been abiding to is merely one version of the whole spectrum? A young woman in this room asked me how she would get ahead in her company without appearing to be aggressive. The story we have been told about how a woman should be goes like this : a decent woman should be beautiful, well-liked and she should not be aggressive.
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My way as a leader in films would be to create protagonists that challenges that notion of a woman, what defines a woman. What if my protagonist is a woman who is aggressive ? What if she is really funny too ? Maybe there is a pretty cool story behind her aggression.
The most challenge that women filmmaker face is the lack of trust in women despite women's achievements. The making of a film is similar to a venture capital project or a start-up. You can only make a film after you raised enough funding. In the venture capital markets in the US, all-women founders raised only 2% of all venture capital in 2017 according to Fortune magazine. That's US$1.9 billion out of a total of US$89 billion invested money in the USA.
So it's not surprising that women comprise around 7% of all directors working on the top 250 box office films in 2016 . In the 90 year history of the Oscars, only 5 women had been nominated to be Best Directors. This is compared to a total of almost 500 nominations in the 90 years. Only one woman, Kathryn Bigelow, has ever won the award.
Women director are given on average 25% less production budgets than their male counterparts. With less money to make their films ; women has a narrower scope in choosing their genres. And when their films are finally completed, women's films are also shown on less number of screens ( on average 2/3 of screens) across the USA.
But despite working with one hand tied, an analysis by the online film funding site Slated reveals that films made by women actually reap a greater return on investment. This outcome is especially true for movies with budget of more than US$25million ( Hollywood Reporter Rebecca Sun)
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Who is inspires you most in your industry ?
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Lena Dunham, the writer , director and lead actress of the HBO TV series Girls. The series ran from 2012-2017. Lena went to HBO and said " I don't see myself or my friends represented in television" So she created a character who is always naked on the show, growing up with bad sex experience and unpaid internships; telling a story of a young woman growing up in the new millennium years.
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Lena wrote in Not that Kind of Girl " There is nothing gutsier to me that a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman... As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there is still so many forces that conspiring to tell woman that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren't needed.. "
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I love her for "displaying" her body in every episodes of Girls. Her body is considered to be overweight by our standards; with bits sticking out. But for a young woman to have the audacity to show her body , sometimes almost all of it, is a revolution for me.
We are told , especially in Asia, that a woman needs to be of a certain shape to be loved. Our skin needs to be white, hairless or is it luminous ? Basically it's preferably to look like an untouched virgin. Who has time for that ? I say, fuck you ! Lena with her overweight body becomes a symbol of solidarity, of courage to defy standards created by the mass media.
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What are the common mistakes made for new leaders
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I think not setting aside the time to speak about your achievement and work. It's common because you have this ambitious long term goal and you feel that you are not there yet. So in the meantime you keep quiet about it.
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I did not understand that until one year, TimeOut wrote a small article about me on their March Art Issue. It went something like " Gina has been quietly working hard at a back alley on Hollywood Road since 2008 and Experimenta had put together some ground breaking shows.. " I dawned on me I was "quiet" and TimeOut was right about that. I was so quiet about my work such that even people in the arts didn't know about many of my exhibitions.
It was hard because I find it difficult to speak in front of a crowd. I did not know what to do.
As it turned out, a high power woman helped me. Marie De Pascale was the program director of Art Central in 2015. One day out of the blue, she called and invited Experimenta to curate a 6 day film program. She sent me to speak to half a dozen of reporters. That's how I first learned how to tell my own story. I didn't think anyone would be interested. I spent a lot of time preparing for each magazine interview. I researched my topics thoroughly.
I must have done OK because Marie then invited me to speak at Art Central press conference. There were Marie, the executive director of Art Central and me. Three of us were answering questions in a room with over 160 reporters that day. I thanked Marie for giving me a voice. That day, I learnt that I do have a story to tell. In fact, if Marie had not given me that chance, I would not be here today.
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This leads to a question asked earlier about how women can empower other women. Films with a woman director or producer hires a higher percentage of women.
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It was at Art Central that my work was spotted by a professor at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing ( CAFA ). The Academy is considered by many the most prestigious art academy in China. Experimenta took part in a biennale in 2016 at CAFA. And that leads to the move by Experimenta from Hong Kong to Beijing. That would be another story for another time.
What are the most rewarding aspects of leadership ?
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The best thing about this journey is not the awards or the films I got to make, it's the kind of person you have to become in order to be a leader in the first place.
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In the 15 years that I have been involved in arts and films, I have seen myself grown to become a woman. The French writer and feminist Simone de Beauvoir wrote " you are not born, but rather, becomes a woman" I had only just begun to understand what she means in the last few years. And today I am proud to say that yes, I am a woman.
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What is a woman to you ? A woman is who I am. It's not whether I had fulfilled what any tradition or religion had defined what a woman is or can be. If a tradition had dictated a woman needed to be submissive; then even if I had been aggressive I am still a woman. Because who I am is already enough. Who I am is already one defining moment of being a woman.
Becoming a leader is also the same as becoming yourself. It is to take on a journey of expressing and finding the source of your being. For many, this could take a lifetime. It could be the easiest and the most difficult thing you could do in a lifetime.