Research Symposium

BIO

I am a Behavioral Neuroscience major raised in Colombia. I am currently a freshman at FSU and aside from UROP I am also involved with the Neuroscience undergraduate club and volunteering in a project about the correlation of decaying spatial orientation skills and the development of Alzheimer's.

Representation of Women in Female-Directed Bollywood Films

Abstract

The Bollywood film industry has been male-dominated for many decades, with female actors receiving much less representation. This project focuses on whether or not women directors impact the representation of women characters in their films. This is crucial in determining what having a woman in the role of a director can have on a film and the representation of women that are in the films. The research analyzes Bollywood films that are directed by women. To identify the number and quality of female characters, a method called “film coding” is used. This is done by watching the films closely and marking certain criteria that relate to each female character's portrayal. Sometimes it is marked if the character does not meet this criteria. The movie is watched one time through to identify the number of speaking female characters, after this has been completed the “film coding” begins and the findings are entered into a coding survey for each character. The research remains in its initial stages, yet following the study of a few films, preliminary results hint at interesting results. They could imply that women directors can have a positive impact on the representation of women in films. If this proves to be true this could lead to a greater representation of women not only in Bollywood films but in all films.

Keywords: Bollywood female directors