Sadat and Maksimović Blast Film Funding Bias at Tokyo Festival
- The Scoop: Shahrbanoo Sadat and Jelena Maksimović used the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Tokyo Talk stage to indict structural gender bias in film financing.
- The Core Charge: Sadat argued discrimination begins at project development, not festival selection, with women “not daring” to apply to major funds.
- Career Momentum: Sadat opened the 76th Berlinale with No Good Men and sits on the Venice competition jury; Maksimović brought Until the Day Ends to Venice’s Orizzonti.
- Institutional Backing: Sadat’s Super Afghan Gym was financed through Cate Blanchett’s Displacement Film Fund.
Shahrbanoo Sadat and Jelena Maksimović turned the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Tokyo Talk session into a direct confrontation with the financing structures that govern women’s cinema worldwide.
Speaking at the TIFF Lounge in Tokyo Midtown Hibiya, the two directors traced the industry’s gender imbalance back to its earliest and least visible checkpoint: the development ledger.
Development Funding Is Where the Pipeline Actually Breaks
Sadat delivered the session’s sharpest diagnosis, locating the failure well before any festival selection committee convenes. “The discrimination did not start at the festival, but it started at the development level,” she told the room.
Her follow-up landed harder. “We didn’t dare to apply to the big funding to get more money for our films because we knew we wouldn’t get the money there.” That admission describes a self-reinforcing exclusion loop, where applicants pre-emptively withdraw before evaluators ever rule.
She characterized the disparity as “treated so normally,” a phrase that indicts institutional habit rather than individual malice. The argument reframes festival parity debates as a downstream symptom of upstream capital allocation.
Maksimović shared the panel, bringing the perspective of a filmmaker whose Until the Day Ends premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti section. The pairing of an Afghan-born director and a Serbian filmmaker underscored how broadly the funding gap cuts across national cinema systems.
Berlinale Openers and Venice Slots: The Credentials Behind the Critique
Neither filmmaker arrived at the panel as a marginal voice. Sadat’s No Good Men opened the 76th Berlinale and screened in Tokyo, with a Japanese release scheduled for 2027.
That film carried its own production wound: the originally cast lead withdrew three weeks before shooting, forcing Sadat into the role herself. It is the kind of scramble that development-level underfunding makes routine rather than exceptional.
Sadat’s Super Afghan Gym, meanwhile, was financed through Cate Blanchett’s Displacement Film Fund, one of five shorts backed alongside work by Mohammad Rasoulof and Hasan Kattan. The film observes Afghan housewives gathering at a Kabul gym during the single hour reserved for women.
Her Venice competition jury seat this year adds institutional weight to the critique, placing her inside the very selection apparatus she is now pressing to examine.
The Festival Circuit as Pressure Point, Not Safe Harbor
Tokyo’s decision to platform this conversation positions the festival as a venue for industry self-scrutiny rather than pure celebration. The Tokyo Talk format gives filmmakers a rare on-record forum between premieres.
The commercial stakes extend beyond rhetoric. Development shortfalls dictate which projects reach production floors at all, shaping the release calendars tracked across our industry news desk for years to come.
For distributors and buyers, the panel signals a coming wave of filmmakers demanding financing transparency as a precondition for partnership. That pressure will register across acquisition negotiations monitored in contemporary release coverage of the festival circuit.
The economics are blunt: every project abandoned at development is a theatrical title that never reaches a screen, and the festivals now amplifying that loss are the same ones that will feel it in their competition lineups.