They’re high-flying businesswomen working in banking, an industry in which men still hold well over 90% of the senior positions. Not only does ingrained sexism make it almost impossible for them to become managing directors or CEOs, when they do land such jobs, they’re stereotyped as grasping and aggressive “dragon women.”
In her new documentary, Belgian director Frederique De Montblanc explores the lives of some of these women. Whether they’re working in Asia, Europe or the US, they’re confronted with the same dilemmas.
The idea for the film came to De Montblanc after she met one of the so-called dragon women, a Swiss banker, in a bar in Paris. “She was celebrating a promotion she had just got. She was named managing director of the bank she working in. But she was celebrating in a bittersweet sort of way…she told me she was promoted by a boss who congratulated himself for promoting a woman and that she had felt extremely patronised.”
De Montblanc realised just how tough it was for women in the higher echelons of banking.
That said, finding dragon women subjects was relatively straightforward. The director talks of the “snowball effect…every woman would direct me to another one.” She interviewed over 60 potential subjects before choosing her doc’s protagonists.
“[But] the banks were a huge issue. It was complicated to get the banks on board because they didn’t want to be affiliated to any sort of feminist subject matter,” De Montblanc remembers the resistance she encountered.
The banks already had a certain paranoia about their dirty laundry being aired in public. They didn’t really understand the concept behind the documentary. “It was hard to tell them that I wanted to do a series of intimate portraits of women. They don’t get that. In some cases, I had to cancel shootings because in some cases the banks weren’t helping at all. Actually, they were working against us.”
De Montblanc wanted as diverse a group as she could find: women of different ages, with different family situations. She soon realised, though, that the dragon women weren’t really dragon women at all. Her subjects turned out to have “a very ambiguous relationship to power…a lot of men go into finance to make money because money equates [to] power but I think that, for women, it’s a bit different,” the director reflects. Their motivations tend to be different. Yes, they are “money hungry” too but that was only ever part of what drove them.
The director comes from a theatre and fine art background. This influenced the way she approached the documentary. “Before this film, I did a dance film and I am very obsessed with gesture in general. In a lot of cases, in meetings or when you’re filming people mostly sitting, I was just constantly looking for that little gesture which says something about the human being.”
She’ll show a close-up of two men shaking hands but looking strangely smug and secretive as they do so.
De Montblanc set out to shoot the banks themselves in a way which reflected their corporate, impersonal atmosphere. “There’s a certain coldness to the way I shot,” she acknowledges.
The workplace scenes are contrasted with far warmer, more intimate moments when the women are shown at home.
Shooting began in 2017. Early on, the filmmaker focused on subjects like the pay gap between men and women and what it was like to be “harassed on a regular basis.” Gradually, though, her perspective changed, “The women were very reluctant to talk about these things because they consider themselves as anything but victims.” The film began to tackle bigger existential questions, for example ‘why do we work’ and ‘what is it like to be a woman in a masculine world.’
Dragon Women is De Montblanc’s first documentary. Now, though, she is trying something completely different. One of her next projects is Josiane Supernova, a fictional yarn about a young woman with a genius for analysing space propellers. “It’s a comedy with a bit of a Wes Anderson aesthetic,” she says of the project which she is co-writing with Noëmie Nicolas and which is being produced by Wrong Men.
Dragon Women (sold by Rise & Shine and produced by Bart Van Langendonck’s Savage Films alongside Beauvoir Films and SeeSaw Pictures) has been screening this week in National Competition at Visions Du Réel.
After Nyon, the film will show at DOK.fest Munich. Various broadcasters are already aboard, among them WRD in Germany, RTS in Switzerland and RTBF/VRT in Belgium.
“Crossing fingers, it would be great if we can get into theatres but everyone is telling me don’t count on it,” the director sighs as she contemplates the challenges facing theatrical documentaries in the wake of the pandemic.
