What’s Your Point, Honey?

Another interesting movie that will never get a regular run – on purpose:

Two directors have decided not to wait for Hollywood’s re-evaluation of women in movies. AmySewell, writer of 2005’s acclaimed documentary Mad Hot Ballroom, and film producer Susan Toffler completed What’s Your Point, Honey? in January of this year and have taken it on the road, screening the film in independent theaters and private venues across America. The two first-time directors have concluded that a grassroots approach is the only way to have their movie seen. Why? Because it’s a movie about women. What’s more, it’s a movie about feminism, about young women fighting to achieve quality in the workplace, and in government—not a movie about attractive, rich white women who shop and gossip about men all day. So don’t call it a chick flick.

What’s Your Point, Honey? screened at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center on a rainy Thursday, July 10. The documentary, which the ladies began filming in 2005, centers around CosmoGirls!’s (that’s right, CosmoGirl! is involved in a feminist movie) Project 2024. In 2002, CosmoGirl! teamed up with The White House Project to offer an internship program to college girls. It was named Project 2024 because that’s when the youngest readers would be 35, old enough to run for president. The program is intended to encourage more female readers to run for public office and to one day—if not 2024, then before—close the gender gap in presidential nominees. Not one female candidate running against eight male nominees, but eight women running alongside eight men.

Sewell and Toffler document seven young women who participated in Project 2024. Their stories are just one portion of the portrait painted about women and girls in America today. The film also follows three female tweens around New York as they question kids their age and adults as to why there hasn’t yet been a female president. Another story is told, albeit subtly, through the eyes of teenagers as they learn about male-female inequalities in school and ignore it in their fashion magazines and the media-infested world around them.

I’m going to order the DVD.