I am truly so exhausted by the implication that only films made by and starring women can have anything interesting to say about a woman’s experience of the world. I, a woman, have the capacity to read and watch all manner of things and glean meaning from them, even if it stars or is directed by or was written by a man. Yes, we need more female filmmakers, writers, directors, actors represented across the many intersections of womanhood. This is true. But the worst possible version of this is to write ‘female versions’ of stories that already exist, of films that have already been made, either pulling out female characters already rendered well and portrayed beautifully and putting them in much worse, much shallower narratives for the sake of a toothless, mainstream, sanitised and sellable version of feminism, or simply taking male characters and making them female for some unclear purpose.
