Ladies Power-Lunched in Bouclé at the Tribeca Chanel Women’s Filmmaker Program Luncheon

Yesterday afternoon bouclé, tweeds, and quilted leather descended upon Tribeca’s Locanda Verde restaurant. The occasion was the fifth annual Through Her Lens lunch, hosted by Chanel and Tribeca Enterprises, which serves as a kickoff to a three-day program during which 10 female filmmakers receive mentorship and classes (from costume design to producing) toward the development of a short film. On the final day one pair of filmmakers will receive full financing to realize their film.

But before all that, lunch! A lovely lunch where the Chanel-clad likes of Katie Holmes, Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Emily Mortimer, Keke Palmer, Jemima Kirke, Dianna Agron, and more welcomed the participants of the program: Catherine Keener, Nicole Holofcener, Anne Carey, Julie Dash, Lesli Linka Glatter, Dede Gardner, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Ane Crabtree, Sabine Hoffman, Laura Karpman, and Amy Hobby.

After a cocktail hour filled with double kisses and how do you dos, everyone took their seat at an elegantly laid table (it’s a Chanel event, after all!) and began a whipped-ricotta toast first course. Jane Rosenthal, CEO of Tribeca Enterprises, welcomed the crowd with a reading of an excerpt from Margaret Talbot’s “The Women Who Helped Build Hollywood” piece in the New Yorker; “One of the stranger things about the history of moviemaking is that women have been there all along, periodically exercising real power behind the camera, yet their names and contributions keep disappearing, as though security had been called, again and again, to escort them from the set.”

She continued citing, “Some scholars estimate that half of all film scenarios in the silent era were written by women” and then broke from the story to pose a question to the crowd: “What happened? Only 4% of the top 11,000 films in the past decade were directed by women, and less than 1% were directed by women of color.”

Perhaps there’s no one answer to what happened, but everyone at the lunch had come together to be a part of the solution. Cheers to that.