Alma Har’el Talks Collaborating with Time for 100 Women of the Year Initiative
By Jazz Tangcay
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Filmmaker Alma Har’el helped conceive Time’s 100 Women of the Year issue, designed to recognize the contributions of female leaders, innovators, activists, entertainers, athletes and artists who defined the century from 1920 through 2019. Along with original portraits, the magazine will release 100 covers reflecting the era of each year.
“I don’t think has ever done anything this big,” “Honey Boy” director Har’el says, speaking exclusively to Variety. “They usually do one of these covers a year. We’re doing 100 of them.”
“If I felt hungry to take solace in some of the histories of some of these women, I immersed myself in it in the most encompassing way I could,” she adds. The idea was born out of Ha’rel’s frustration and a need to “do something that takes me outside of myself.”
Har’el spent much of 2019 on the awards trail discussing “Honey Boy,” a drama written by and starring Shia LaBeouf. Many of her conversations, she said, revolved around “fellow female filmmakers and exclusion.” After the Oscars failed to nominate any women in the best director category, the question, Har’el says, became about “the five best director nominees being male and who would you take out?”
But that question, Har’el says, was the problem, glossing over the larger issue: “It’s about looking at how women are represented, remembered and how women are written out of history.”
Har’el notes that only five female directors have been nominated in the Academy’s 92-year history, with only one — Kathryn Bigelow — winning. “And how is it that Alice Guy-Blaché, who was the first woman to open up a film studio in New York before Hollywood existed, directed over 1000 films — she wrote the films, produced them and was one of the first filmmakers ever in the whole world to explore narratives and to cast intersectional casts — how is she not a household name?” Har’el asks. “How is she a name that most people don’t have a clue who she is?”
That question and that frustration forced Har’el to look not just at the limitations within Hollywood, but in history at large. She looked at everything from the suffragists in the 1920s to Greta Thunberg’s recent activism and spent three months working with the selection committee at Time in putting it all together.
“There is this narrative that women in most of history have been oppressed,” she explains. “The truth is that women have been warriors, artists and scientists and they haven’t been remembered in the same way that men have been.”
Har’el says that’s where Time became the ideal platform to launch the initiative, and that seeing women such as Jackie Kennedy, China Machado, Angela Davis, Jane Roe and Aung San Suu Kyi on the covers is striking.
While Har’el didn’t write any of the essays, women like Lena Waithe, MJ Rodriguez and Zazie Beetz did. “Each woman brought her perspective to this, broadening the way we looked at this list,” she says.
She didn’t want the essays to be about her perspective, but more importantly, the need to see these stories out in the world.
Har’el had suggestions — some she fought for never made it, and there were some ideas she didn’t agree with.
“Golda Meir was the president of Israel. Politically, I would have picked Education Minister Shulamit Aloni, who fought for Palestinian, but I didn’t get everything I want,” she says. “But Meir had a huge impact on U.S./Israel relationships and it shaped the Middle East.”
The process was a huge history lesson for Har’el and one she hopes will encourage others to be curious about these stories and visionaries.
Har’el recalls a time she was up watching a late-night TV show in Tel Aviv. The host brought out two men and two women to discuss several topics. “In one episode, this very famous musician got up and asked, ‘what is this discussion about women? Did you fight wars? What did you do?’ That was a turning point for me because of my education, I never really got that,” she explains.
“Lena (Waithe) said, ‘The more we tell our stories and the more we talk, the less they can erase us and I think that’s true.”
See the full list of Time’s 100 Women of the Year below.
1920 The Suffragists
1921 Emmy Noether
1922 Xiang Jingyu
1923 Bessie Smith
1924 Coco Chanel
1925 Margaret Sanger
1926 Aimee Semple McPherson
1927 Queen Soraya Tarzi
1928 Anna May Wong
1929 Virginia Woolf
1930 Martha Graham
1931 Maria Montessori
1932 Babe Didrikson
1933 Frances Perkins
1934 Mary McLeod Bethune
1935 Amelia Earhart
1936 Wallis Simpson
1937 Soong Mei-ling
1938 Frida Kahlo
1939 Billie Holiday
1940 Dorothea Lange
1941 Jane Fawcett and the Codebreakers
1942 The Resisters
1943 Virginia Hall
1944 Recy Taylor
1945 Chien-Shiung Wu
1946 Eva Perón
1947 Amrit Kaur
1948 Eleanor Roosevelt
1949 Simone de Beauvoir
1950 Margaret Chase Smith
1951 Lucille Ball
1952 Queen Elizabeth II
1953 Rosalind Franklin
1954 Marilyn Monroe
1955 The Bus Riders
1956 Golda Meir
1957 Irna Phillips
1958 China Machado
1959 Grace Hopper
1960 The Mirabal Sisters
1961 Rita Moreno
1962 Jacqueline Kennedy
1963 Rachel Carson
1964 Barbara Gittings
1965 Dolores Huerta
1966 Stephanie Kwolek
1967 Zenzile Miriam Makeba
1968 Aretha Franklin
1969 Marsha P. Johnson
1970 Gloria Steinem
1971 Angela Davis
1972 Patsy Takemoto Mink
1973 Jane Roe
1974 Lindy Boggs
1975 American Women
1976 Indira Gandhi
1977 Judith Heumann
1978 Lesley Brown
1979 Tu Youyou
1980 Anna Walentynowicz
1981 Nawal El Saadawi
1982 Margaret Thatcher
1983 Françoise Barré-Sinoussi
1984 bell hooks
1985 Wilma Mankiller
1986 Corazon Aquino
1987 Diana, Princess of Wales
1988 Florence Griffith Joyner
1989 Madonna
1990 Aung San Suu Kyi
1991 Anita Hill
1992 Sinead O’Connor
1993 Toni Morrison
1994 Joycelyn Elders
1995 Sadako Ogata
1996 Ruth Bader Ginsburg
1997 Ellen DeGeneres
1998 J.K. Rowling
1999 Madeleine Albright
2000 Sandra Day O’Connor
2001 Wangari Maathai
2002 The Whistleblowers
2003 Serena Williams
2004 Oprah Winfrey
2005 Melinda Gates
2006 Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
2007 Lilly Ledbetter
2008 Michelle Obama
2009 Malala Yousafzai
2010 Nancy Pelosi
2011 Tawakkol Karman
2012 Pussy Riot
2013 Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi
2014 Beyoncé Knowles-Carter
2015 Angela Merkel
2016 Hillary Rodham Clinton
2017 The Silence Breakers
2018 Maria Ressa
2019 Greta Thunberg
