ANNA FISHBEYN INTERVIEW
There was such a positive impact on the audience from this early version of the movie that it makes me hopeful for the impact the film will have in its finished form, Galaxy 360: A Woman’s Playground. You direct, write, act in all mediums. Do you have a favorite “role"? AF: My favorite “role” is the magical intersection between directing and acting because it is the most challenging, and on some level the most satisfying. It forces me to fire on all cylinders - as the actor and creator, switching between roles and tapping into all of my multitasking abilities. It reminds me of the experience of living in two languages and two cultures, Russian and English, precisely because the process of directing is quite different from the visceral experience of acting. In acting, I must become someone else, submit to the role, engage my emotions, my intuitions, etc. Directing engages the part of my brain that is ruled by logic and storytelling: problem-solving, moving the plot, finding solutions, and understanding the actors. Seeing how the other actors interact with me informs the director in me, while the actor in me is informed by the vision of the director. And because I am also an actor with the other actors in the trenches, my vision as a director is better imparted, because I know the challenges in and out, in my own experience. In Galaxy 360: A Woman’s Playground gender roles are reversed. The male actors had to feel powerless to be convincingly ruled by the women, while the female actors needed to feel powerful to convincingly harass and abuse the men. The cast was incredibly talented and courageous and open, each performance was deeply personal, and the work we did together was transformative for all of us. 14
You are a self-described feminist. How do you feel the 1960s feminist movement has evolved since the heyday of Gloria Steinem? AF: We have definitely made progress. I am deeply grateful for the fact that Kamala Harris is our Vice President and that New Zealand and Germany have female leadership. It is also painfully obvious that we still have far to go. I feel that female leadership should be normal, natural, and men and women should share power and wealth, and yet we are constantly told to be grateful for every advance we make, for every successful woman, for every award nomination a woman receives in a field where men have dominated. We do not begin with the presumption of equality - we begin with the presumption of being less than as women. I’d like to see a world where we begin as equals, where women are not beholden to men for their advances, where we do not have to call on men to join us in our striving for equality but a world where men join us voluntarily, call themselves feminists voluntarily, where we don’t have to convince them or beg them or show them that we too can make money or that it’s profitable to hire women or support a woman’s business. Men should want women to be equal to them because it is just and right, because we have born oppression for no reason, because underneath the fabric of our inequality are ancient stereotypes that have no bearing to reality: concepts such as women being “less logical” or “less smart” or “less competent” than men. I’d like to see a world where men fight for this equality because they too see the absurdity of inequality, and because they empathize and have daughters,