The Sundance report draws attention not only to the increase in women crews led by females, but also to the fact that in top-grossing films and Best Picture nominees, female directors are more likely to put girls and women in their films.

Lyon said she frequently thinks about the way women are portrayed onscreen.

“Right now, film tells young girls you can be a love interest — you can be a love interest that basically does some ass-kicking first — but you’re still a love interest, like in ‘The Matrix,’ ” Lyon said. “You can be someone’s mother, who might also find love eventually, but you’re someone’s mother. Or you can be that weird awkward girl or that annoying popular girl from ‘Mean Girls.’ There’s a very limited vocabulary of what women are.”

“I think what film really needs to do for us gender-wise is give us examples, open our imagination for who women can be and what their strengths could be outside of home and outside of relationships,” she continued. “Because when you can expose so many people to an idea, I think that’s one of the ones we can focus on to really change this unfortunately skewed sense of women.”

Lyon mentioned a screenwriter friend of hers in New York who wrote a script for a film centered on a female superhero. A group of producers thought it was great, but said it would never fly without the inclusion of a strong relationship arc.

According to Lyon, the unwillingness to try new types of characters and challenge stereotypes of women onscreen is innately tied up with the gender barrier behind the scenes.

“If we started changing the storylines for women, then I think women would have a lot more space to have their voices heard,” Lyon said. “Right now, we’re very much so telling men’s stories.”

“They’re not going to ask me to make ‘Blade Runner.’ ”
- Naomi Foner, Sundance Film Festival Women Director’s Roundtable, Jan. 16, 2013

So, do men make different movies than women?

LSA junior Kelsey Juddo is the director of photography for “Fender Bender.” She also took the upper-level SAC production class last year and worked on “The V Card,” a film about a group of girls trying to lose their virginity. Even though the story was about women, it was directed by two men. The other film, about a male Hasidic Jew trying to find his place in the world, was directed by a woman.

“I thought it worked out really well,” Juddo said.

Many of the students I talked to remarked that moviegoers sometimes expect women to make more sensitive films and love stories. Bigelow is the clear exception to the notion that women can’t make gory action flicks.

Try looking up the most recent romcom you saw. Chances are that it was made by a man.

So, while women and men can tell the same stories, the ways in which they tell them differ. While “Zero Dark Thirty” is a spy thriller, it doesn’t come with the sexualization and reinforcements of masculinity and femininity so common to the genre.

Layne Simescu, an LSA junior and the production designer for the second SAC 423 film project this year, “Open House,” agreed that the stories we see onscreen are often dominated by male points of view.

Just look at the slate of Best Picture nominees this year. With the exceptions of “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” male characters control the narratives.

“Historically, movies have always been made by males, so we’ve always got that kind of viewpoint,” Simescu said. “If more females started making films, it would turn the filmmaking industry on its head.”

“What we see projected onscreen in the media is really powerful in shaping the ideas about ourselves and shaping the world we live in,” Libresco said when asked about the importance of increasing access to filmmaking. “So, the stories we tell actually shape our experiences and vice versa.