Geena Davis: Thelma and Louise star on setting up her own film festival and getting more women on screen

Last year surprised residents of Bentonville, Arkansas, reported that they opened their mailboxes to find recruitment letters from the Ku Klux Klan. One can only imagine what the KKK, headquartered less than a hundred miles away, might make of the first Bentonville Film Festival, specifically designed to champion women and diversity within film.

The green pastures of Bentonville, with a population of 40,000 and a gloriously kitsch town square that could have sent Marty McFly back to the future in 1955, seems like an odd choice of location. It’s not home for the actor Geena Davis, who co-founded this event, even if her most famous character, housewife-turned-runaway robber Thelma from Thelma & Louise (1991) started her road trip in Arkansas. But Bentonville is under the benign rule of the world’s third largest employer, Walmart, which has its headquarters here. And they are the festival’s largest sponsor, along with Coca-Cola and Google.

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Davis, who will turn 60 next year and is still all long, statuesque limbs and chestnut hair, says her festival is “unashamedly commercial – my main priority is these films actually get seen”.The winning film-makers in her competition – only female-centric, female-made or ethnically diverse movies may apply – are guaranteed a release with Walmart, which is the biggest seller of DVDs in the US. The festival also has secured deals with cable channel Lifetime, Netflix rival Vudu and cinema chain AMC.

“At Tribeca or Cannes, you enter in the hope of possibly getting a distribution deal,” Davis says earnestly. “Here, you know that you win, you’re going to be seen. My hope is that it will become an aspiration to come to Bentonville – and they’ll employ more women and minorities in order to qualify.”

While Davis, an Oscar winner for 1988’s The Accidental Tourist, still acts (most recently in TV series Gray’s Anatomy, and as a female president in 2005’s Commander in Chief), for a decade she’s been more preoccupied by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, established to conduct gender diversity research, and then, if necessary, effect change. Like her character Dottie in 1992’s baseball movie A League of Their Own, Davis is determined to strike a home run on behalf of her marginalised sex.

Davis claims passionately that women are marginalised in her industry, with not only “a dearth of female film-makers but a dearth of female characters, from the moment kids start watching,” she maintains. “We are teaching kids to grow up with an unconscious bias against girls. Not only are they not there on screen, but if they are, they’re not doing aspirational things. In science, technology and mathematics, male characters outnumber female characters by seven to one.

“Worse, the girls are often serving the function of eye candy. Our research shows that statistically, there is almost no difference in the way a female character is dressed between a film rated 12 and a film rated 18. I’ve often said to my kids, ‘now why do you think she’s wearing that if she’s off to rescue someone?’ It’s leading to the hyper-sexualisation of young girls.”

It was watching TV with her daughter, Alizeh, aged 13, and 11-year old twin boys Kian and Kaiis by her surgeon husband, Reza Jarrahy, that propelled Davis into action. “I kept on wondering, where are the girls?” she recalls. “No research had been done on gender inequality in the media, so I went for it.”

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According to her findings, the imbalances are worst within family films and children’s programming. In primetime television, the success of shows such as Orange Is the New Black, Girls and Jane the Virgin means that audiences can see one woman for every 1.5 men. On children’s TV, that rises to three boys for every girl on screen. She believes, however, that “it’s not a conscious plot against girls, it’s just there have been more men writing scripts than women”.

However, since Patricia Arquette raised her Oscar in February and lamented women’s pay packets, the lack of female representation has become Hollywood’s hot topic. Talking points include Meryl Streep starting a fund for female writers over the age of 40; the complaints about Disney not making a Black Widow Avengers doll; and even the putative Wonder Woman director Michelle MacLaren leaving the film – to be replaced by another woman, Patty Jenkins, the director of 2003’s Monster. The word feminist has been on lips as famous as Emma Watson’s, while those of Comic Con’s female delegates have been pursed at the idea that Marvel won’t release a female-centred superhero movie, Captain Marvel, until 2018. Why the need for this festival, when the tide slowly seems to be turning? Davis rolls her eyes in reply.

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“Because whenever I met with Hollywood executives in the past, their immediate response on this topic was ‘oh, we’ve fixed it’. When The Hunger Games came out, everyone thought ‘the female hero’ issue was sorted. It hasn’t been sorted.”

Perhaps Davis is right – after all, it took nearly 25 years to produce another pair of leading ladies like Thelma and Louise – Elsa and Anna in Jennifer Lee’s Frozen. It’s her sons’ favourite film, says Davis, snorting at the idea that boys don’t want to watch films about girls. “If we can change what the future looks like on screen, we can change what it looks like in real life,” she says. “The media is the only industry that can actually change what it does overnight. I think it’s going to happen.”

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Considering its size, Bentonville is disproportionately familiar with celebrity – locals report that both Taylor Swift and Justin Timberlake have been seen in recent years, as guests of Walmart. Davis too brought a few of her friends along – Courteney Cox for the closing ceremony, Rosie O’Donnell for a special screening of A League of Their Own at the local baseball park; even Robert De Niro talking about his artist father, Robert De Niro Sr, at nearby Crystal Bridges art gallery. Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke gave a directing masterclass, while Melissa Joan Hart, of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch fame, had a panel with the title of In Control of Her Destiny.

The festival had other, slightly ominous sounding panels such as Gender Equality: Why Men Matter, but its programme had solid fare to appeal to Middle America – the witty Pitch Perfect 2, Fan Girl, which is directed by a man, Paul Jarrett but concerns a 15-year-old girl who loves punk music and wants to direct films. Then there’s Maggie Kiley’s’ Dial a Prayer, starring Brittany Snow and William H Macy, about a girl working on a local prayer hotline.

All are films one can imagine slipping into a shopping trolley at Walmart, but there were edgier documentaries too, including the excellent Girl from God’s Country by Karen Day, about a pioneering silent movie star, Nell Shipman, who wrote films about women as self-reliant heroines who rescue men.

It is not just Bentonville’s board of advisors – which includes Julianne Moore, Eva Longoria and Natalie Portman – which could deliver a kerpow punch for the event. The reason for the corporate backing is simple: Walmart and Coca-Cola both report that in 85 per cent of US households, it is females making the financial decisions. That includes buying films.