#ustoo

There’s been a lot of talk about women in the industry and what’s the position their put in or problems their facing when working due to their gender. 

When we started Blockbusters Gang we surely though about how being four young women creating something new and battling against the old school ways of working would affect our sales. We had a small fear of being labeled as the “girlpower team” – not that there’s anything wrong with girls or power, but BBG wasn’t created to solve as womens but peoples solution for the industry. This had one special affect on our launch: the final chose of our gang outfits. When creating our uniforms there was one rule, nothing too sexy, since we didn’t want to be listening to those comments for all the days to come. So, we decided let’s be a bit (ok, a lot maybe) over the top and go with the Ghostbusters inspiration on that as well. Base of the uniform is sold as “nuclear warfare overall” on finnish market selling excess military stuff. It fits no one and looks like a garbage bag on everyone. Perfect. 

But actually sexism never had any impact on our concept except this. We always wanted to be as professional as possible to be as good as possible. But for sure professionality has an impact with other things as well. 

Most of our gang members work and live in Finland where things are overall pretty good. We’re currently 17 members of which 15 are women (sorry boys, we’ve met too many outstanding ladies when recruiting) and for sure we can say every one of them have experienced some harassment, downgrading or universal doubts on how good they can be on their jobs due to their gender. And this isn’t small or rare – we have many very sad and pretty horrible stories about encounters our gang members have had on their careers. These have affected us mostly by creating a stronger community and making us stronger towards strangers, creating more understanding towards those who feel threatened or too shy to even try.

Us founders are not afraid to be women. Being them has opened us many doors – not just because we’re tall scandinavians but because of the attention it sometimes brought to us we could pitch ourselves and astonish even the people who didn’t see it coming. Working in film is often turning our weaknesses into our strenghts. Is pretty sad to feel being young or pretty is a weakness. Actually we felt it’s absolutely hideous. So we didn’t and started not to care less about it – enjoying ourselves and ignoring norms and labels. 

We hope our attitude and work speak for themselves. We’ve chosen to embrace everyones qualities and personality as something that makes their work unique from others. We hope in our gang and working environment everyone is equal and will not be reviewed by their gender, sexual orientation, age or looks. We’re extremely proud to have gang members from multiple minorities and hopefully be able to make their road in film business slightly less bumpy. 

This is for all filmmakers out there – young and old, rich and poor, rookies and veterans – let’s make our industry the best possible to work in. No one needs to feel uncomfortable when at work. Give some room, treat people and their bodies with respect. That’s the least we all can do.