Beyond the Frame by Nile Connolly-Martin
Nile Connolly-Martin has worked across a range of areas in the film and TV industry, beginning in development and live event production. She has credits for continuing drama, comedy, High End TV drama, and short films from her time as a camera trainee and has worked on a variety of industry events including queer film festivals in London and Vancouver. Nile is currently focusing on her own scripted project and a documentary short film.
One of my favourite things about being queer is the fact that it changed the world for me. Yes, only a little thing, changed the whole world. By unpicking the notion of an assumed life structure, heteronormative expectations of marriage to some guy, and having children, I was encouraged to challenge other assumptions. This I explored through my own thoughts and experiences but also very much through queer film, art, and countless hours of LGBTQIA+ YouTubers’ videos. What is family? What does it mean to be a person in this world? What is gender? What is sexuality? How these can be fluid and shift. Who has power and is heard, who is othered, overlooked, and pushed down?
I learned that absolutes are misleading. Being born of parents from different socio-economic backgrounds, genders, and ethnicities fed into my understanding of privilege. I must check my own too, as a non-disabled cis woman with light skin who has been afforded opportunities, education, and financial support. I also have a name that people often assume belongs to a white Irish dude. There could be seen to be privilege in the way that I am queer too, in that relationships with men are an option for me. As I say, absolutes are misleading, I am not black, nor white, I am not gay, nor straight and yet I am all of these.
My identity and the industry have, at points, felt aligned. Through my desire to connect more with the queer community and a love of film, I volunteered and worked on queer film festivals, film sets, and projects. I worked for a couple of years on more ‘traditional’ TV and short film sets as a camera trainee and (though happily, I did work with some queer people) found that queer community was something I missed almost unbearably. The camera department is often, somewhat like the industry as a whole, predominantly straight white cis men. While some of these people were absolutely lovely, my identity and the industry began to feel very separate. This need for community was one I couldn’t fulfill within nor outside of a role as the demands left me mostly just recovering and doing laundry in the hours leftover each week. While I had not decided what shape I wanted my family to look like in the future, or whether it included children or not, finding other core needs of my own neglected (sleep, doctor’s appointments), this seemed impossible. This lifestyle was unsustainable for me and felt like it limited my options for the future, so I left the camera department.
The reason I have been reflecting on this is because we are at a time when the film and TV industry is having to adapt, restructure, and shift to find ways to reduce risk of COVID-19 transmission. While of course, this is a complicated enough task in itself, I wonder about what else could be built into new structures for the future. How can we make structural and lasting improvements in our industry rather than superficial changes that simply do not reach far enough? I am not saying I have the answers, nor that any one person can, but I think every one of us learning as much as we can, thinking beyond ourselves and advocating for others (crucially not instead of but alongside their voices) is key to it all, for the industry and in life.
Along the way, I have seen different approaches to inclusivity in queer film festivals and spaces with regard to gender and accessibility. Practices included asking people’s preferred pronoun or adding pronouns to email signatures, changing the signage on toilets before events or seeking accessible venues with gender-neutral toilets and wheelchair access. These show an awareness and attention to how a variety needs can be taken into consideration that I wish I had seen in the industry at large. Jamie Windust has spoken about their experiences on the set of a popular franchise in this Twitter thread which highlights also how often on-screen and off can be starkly different. They write, ‘Not only were the staff literally all white, but it was a diverse cast of extras that were definitely not all cis, but despite this, for the whole duration of the filming process we were cast and sectioned into 'male and female' groups.’ They go on to say the issue was not solely the crew, but that, ‘other extras were incredibly misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic to the members of the cast who were visibly diverse…sometimes championed and goaded by members of staff eg) oggling (sic) women, discussing having sex with other cast members, but also the homophobia towards other extras all went unchallenged and allowed to happen.’
I am thrilled to see the industry now specifically seeking black talent and hope this will continue as it is a change so very much needed, but I am aware that this is absolutely as a result of the BLM movement. I hope there have been shifts in thinking at the core of these changes, but it would be foolish to assume this is the case. Pressures on organisations to show they are taking action means the results may be just that, a show of action, so lasting change must be continuously fought for and on multiple fronts.
Important in this larger change is attention to intersectionality. Intersectionality is a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in her paper discussing black women in America being subject to two different types of discrimination (race and gender) and this not being viewed as a situation unique to them, to be tackled differently than legal proceedings for white women or black men. We have seen, for example through the Academy and BAFTA awards, that this is absolutely an issue in this industry also in both of these ways. Crenshaw, speaking at WOW Southbank, points out regarding Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement, ‘the emphasis (is) on individual punishment (rather) than institutional and structural reform’. It is key, then, that lasting change is sought in terms of this institutional and structural reform, or we will find that nothing has truly changed.
While this is being thought of in so many different areas I saw a friend’s post about how an audio production application (called REAPER) had updated terms for different audio tracks to be referred to as ‘leader’ or ‘follower’ replacing the shocking former terms ‘master’ and ‘slave’. Upon further investigation, horrifyingly this terminology existed more broadly, including being used in one of the most popular programming languages, Python, until only two years ago. Language shifts also illustrating unsettling links to power dynamics include electrical connectors being referred to as having a ‘gender’, they are ‘male’ or ‘female’, and a pair with one of each that fits together have a ‘mating connection’. These are the kinds of completely unnecessary terms that contribute to making it feel like certain worlds are only for certain people. Terms that often either assume or prioritise whiteness and notions of gender as binary. The fact these words were, or are still, being used as industry standard terminology rather than slang shows the flaws and biases inbuilt in the structure.
For people to continue in the film and TV industry, it strikes me there are other risks too. There must be continued support for people in the creative industries. Now more than ever given the demands on people’s mental health this must be taken into consideration to ensure support is there. Before the pandemic it was clear that access to the creative industries was limited, your chances are higher if you can afford to support yourself while you get experience or if you do not have any dependants, for example. Now this has been compounded and we must hope that people are supported more than ever to ensure it is not only a limited pool of people working in these areas.
Through these times the best thing we can do is be kind and considerate to one another and learn how to make the world better where we can. Sometimes it is grabbing a book to learn more about the history that was neglected or misrepresented in school, sometimes it is doing a little bit of online research about what the gender binary means. I would like to think that everyone is trying to learn a bit more about how to understand and reshape the world for the better, let’s do it for our industry too!
Organisations to learn about / from or support - full disclosure, I have worked with or benefitted from some of the below organisations
BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival
Creative Access
Fringe! Queer Film Fest
Gal-dem.com
Mermaids UK
Sara Putt Agency / Sara Putt Trainee Scheme
The CoLab
The Equal Access Network (Film London)
The London Screen Academy
The MAMA Youth Project
The Network / Ones to Watch (Edinburgh International TV Festival)
The Outside Project
Think Bigger
TriForce Creative Network / Dandi Network / TriForce Short Film Festival
www.Them.us
Individuals / Activists
Akala, ‘Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire’
Reni Eddo-Lodge, ‘Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race’