Athena Film Festival Celebrates 15 Years of Changing How We See Women in Leadership

At the Athena Film Festival, women take the lead on the big screen and behind the scenes. With its unique mission to center and support women in leadership, the Athena Film Festival (AFF) has grown into an invaluable showcase for the diverse cinematic work of women. This week marks the 15th anniversary of the New York City-based festival that aims to deepen and challenge audiences’ understanding of what it means for women and girls to lead.

Co-founded in 2011 by Melissa Silverstein, the founder of Women and Hollywood — an initiative and website advocating gender diversity and inclusion in the film industry — and Kathryn Kolbert, the founding director of Barnard College’s Athena Center for Leadership, with the founding and sustaining support of the Artemis Rising Foundation, the Athena Film Festival champions “diverse, nuanced, and complex stories of women leaders.” Past lineups included the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of Sex and the 2018 election documentary Knock Down the House, as well as Pixar’s Inside Out and the fantasy drama Beasts of the Southern Wild.

The 15th anniversary edition of the festival, which begins March 6 on the campus of Barnard College, will span four days and boasts a lineup of 10 narrative features, 11 documentaries, and 17 short films. Satisfied, a documentary about Tony Award and Grammy Award winner Renée Elise Goldsberry of Hamilton fame, is this year’s opening night film. Directed by Melissa Haizlip and Chris Bolan, Satisfied looks beyond stereotypical realms of women’s leadership such as the C-suite or legislature to depict a woman leading through her candor and contributions to the arts.

“If you think about it, the way that we’ve been brainwashed to think about leadership is very patriarchal,” says Silverstein. “So what we’re trying to do is throw that definition out. Leaders aren’t only the ones who are running the company or the president of the United States. There’s leadership everywhere and in everything you do.”

In addition to screening women-focused movies for thousands of attendees, AFF offers talks and workshops with high-profile filmmakers and artists. Past masterclass leaders include Patricia Riggen, director of the upcoming Viola Davis-starring action movie G20, and One Day at a Time showrunner Gloria Calderón Kellett.

Outside of its annual showcase, AFF offers year-round support to advance “a pipeline of diverse talent working on women-centered projects” through its Creative Development Program, which includes the Athena Film Festival Writers Lab and various fellowships and grants.

AFF will also celebrate the 10th anniversary of its signature screenplay competition, the Athena List, this year. To mark the occasion, the festival will screen a winner from the inaugural Athena List: Lilly, a narrative feature based on the life of pay equity and women’s right activist Lilly Ledbetter starring Patricia Clarkson. (The Women’s Media Center is a social impact partner for Lilly.) The film is set to have a broader theatrical release in May.

“Making independent films is lonely, the creative life is often solitary, and the industry can be harsh to outsiders,” said Lilly director and writer Rachel Feldman of the film’s 10-year journey from script to screen. “Receiving validation from the Athena List was an acknowledgment of merit that helped fuel the push forward.”

The Abortion Pipeline Project is another unique program initiated by the Athena Film Festival. Launched in 2023, the fund and screenplay competition pairs storytellers interested in telling abortion narratives with reproductive justice experts and writing advisors to ensure their work is steeped in expertise.

“Since Roe fell, we have been under threat and siege from [anti-choice groups] and misinformation, and the lies put out have become mainstream,” said Silverstein. “So people don't know things, but are still getting pregnant and still have abortions. And then we’ve noticed that the people who write these scripts are telling personal stories. It's not like, ‘I want to write about that woman who had an abortion over there.’ They want to tell their story. And just the way the world is treating people, stigmatizing them.”

“We also noticed that there are a lot of factual issues, so that was where the expertise came in,” she continued. “We have an expert who can go through your script and make sure you get all those pieces correct. Then we have a writing advisor who could help you with your writing. It’s just really about putting out correct information so that we don't live in a world of misinformation about abortion, and to normalize storytelling on abortion.”

Since its inception, the Athena Film Festival has supported more than 700 filmmakers, screened over 540 films, and administered more than $200,000 in grants, according to its website. Ninety percent of the films screened were made by women or nonbinary people.

“This festival would not have been possible without the visionary support of the Artemis Rising Foundation,” Silverstein noted. “So we’re excited to announce that this year, in honor of our 15th anniversary, Artemis Rising Foundation and its founder, Regina K. Scully, will receive the Athena Film Festival Founding Sponsors Award. This partnership has carried us forward from day one. Not only were they instrumental to the festival’s creation, they are helping to build a pipeline of storytellers through the Artemis Rising Foundation Filmmaker Fellowship program at Barnard. We can’t wait to publicly thank and honor them.”

In recent years, the festival has spotlighted a growing number of international films and women filmmakers from outside of the U.S. Shiori Itō’s Oscar-nominated documentary Black Box Diaries, detailing the investigation of her own sexual assault in Japan, will screen March 7. Films from Italy, Israel, New Zealand, and Argentina are also included in this year’s lineup.

“When we first started doing the festival, there weren’t a lot of movies directed by women that told leadership stories,” said Silverstein. “An evolution and revolution have happened over the last 15 years, which is women telling stories about women, people of color telling their own stories. This is what we should be doing. We can learn a lot from women in other countries about how they approach leadership and other issues.”

Silverstein says the festival’s impact on the larger filmmaking community and cinema can be seen in the writers and directors it instills with the “Athena ethos” of telling stories of women in leadership.

“Whether the script they bring to the lab gets made — we would love that to happen, but that's, you know, the flower on it,” says Silverstein. “It's about how we imbue that ethos so that these artists and creatives take it wherever they go. It's about creating a generation of people who are thinking about writing women differently.”

When asked about the future of the festival itself — the next 15 years — Silverstein said: “I think we're in a kind of down time for the world. Athena can be a place of hope, a place to envision a different kind of world. That's what we've always done. I want people to walk away and say, ‘Yeah, it's looking pretty bad out there. But, you know, the sun is shining on the horizon.’ And the thing about Athena is you could come for a whole weekend, and you only see women on screen. Nowhere else does that.”