‘I can eat this podium with a fork a – Firstpost

Hollywood actress and filmmaker Kristen Stewart has spoken against “the violence of silencing” female directors in the film industry and called it being “in a state of emergency”.

The Chronology of Water director said her fellow women in film should reject tokenism and “print our own currency” at the Academy Women’s Luncheon on Tuesday.

“It’s awkward to talk about inequality for some people,” said
Stewart adding, “We can discuss wage gaps and taxes on tampons and measure it in lots of quantifiable ways, but the violence of silencing … It’s like we’re not even supposed to be angry. But I could eat this podium with a fork and fucking knife, I’m so angry.”

Stewart spent eight years on her ambitious directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, which is adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir. Crediting Yuknavitch as a key inspiration at the beginning of her speech, Kristen said her memoir gave “voice to certain truths I inherently understood”.

“Hard truths, when spoken out loud, become springboards to freedom,” Stewart said, adding, “The permission to be unpalatable, unsanitary, and to come from the inside out … led me to acknowledge the invisible cage that we are all living in and how easy it is to story our way out there.”

Kristen Stewart shared that since #MeToo, women’s voices have garnered more traction, but unsanitised stories still scare the industry. “I can now attest to the bare-knuckle brawling that it takes every step of the way when the content is too dark, too taboo,” the actress said. “Our business,” she added, “is in a state of emergency.

“We are allowed to be proud of ourselves. But let’s try not to be tokenised. Let’s start printing our own currency,” said Stewart.

“I am so for you, I hope you are too. Let’s make art in the face of it,” she concluded.