Girl On Film

The 2017 Women in Film Max Mara Face of the Future Award goes to Zoey Deutch, and she’s determined to keep the focus on female storytellers.

- Clare Maclean

IN OCTOBER 2015, Jennifer Lawrence wrote a piece for Lena Dunham’s feminist newsletter, Lenny, headlined “Why Do I Make Less Than My Male Co-Stars?”. It revealed how she was forced to question her skills as a negotiator after the Sony hack leaks broadcast just how much more the male co-stars in her films were earning. Since then, many other prominent female actors have spoken out about the challenges of being a woman working in Hollywood, from Mila Kunis’s impassioned opinion piece detailing how she was told she’d “never work in this town again” when she refused to promote one of her films by posing half naked for a men’s magazine, to Reese Witherspoon talking about experiencing “Smurfette Syndrome” — being the only woman on set — for the first 25 years of her career. While the status quo is far from perfect, one only need look at the box office success of such empowering films as Hidden Figures, about a team of African-American women at NASA, to see that things are slowly changing for the better, thanks in part to initiatives such as the annual Women in Film Max Mara Face of the Future Award.