Although the Swedish film year 2019 has seen unusually few female screenwriters (the situation is another in the TV series world), women are increasingly taking part of the film cake, even in the big country in the west. But things are going slow.
However, the diversity of origin and skin color, on canvas and screen, has increased substantially over the past two, three years.
If you harden it , the trend can be divided into two subcategories: the more pathos-filled fiction, which aims to speak from an African-American perspective, and where racism is one of the themes of the films. These are fresh works that If beale street could talk, Sorry to bother you, BlackKklansman, Us, Night School, Get out! and a whole bunch more.
Only through their existence on the broad repertoire do they show that white hegemony is being broken, but even more interesting from a popular-cultural perspective are the signs of the times that indicate that diversity has increased even in the broad middle sphere. Thus, in films and series that are not explicitly anti-racist, where the complexion of the protagonist is not part of the conflict of fiction, but merely a fact among others.
As in last summer's Stephen King -potpurri Castle Rock, a series where Black André Holland was given the lead in a type of horror fiction previously reserved for white heroes. Or as in the third season of True Detective, fronted by Mahershala Ali (formerly also Moonlight). In the recent feel good comedy with the Beatles theme, Yesterday, the star is played by the British Hamish Patel.
The otherwise easily forgotten war movie Overlord surprised by having an African American (Jovan Adepo) in focus and so we have of course the superhero films Black Panther and, not as paraphrased, Aquaman, where the magazine magazine's blond heroine hero on film was replaced by Jason Momoa's Hawaii hunk.
Sure, whiteness is still reigning in the industry, but this nevertheless rapid development towards increased equality on the screen / screen comes from an increased understanding of how distorted representation has been since… always. And you can probably say that the hashtag Oscar Snow White was the starting shot, ie the phrase that was first coined in January 2015 when the nominations for that year's Oscar were announced.
The ball was rolling, gaining momentum the following year, as it was still disappearing few non-whites among the 2018 nominees. Then actor Frances McDormand took it all a step further by introducing the term inclusion rider (rider = requirement list on what an artist / actors want to put on a gig), on producers, where she then urged colleagues to demand that the movies and TV series they are in should also employ non-whites, so that the world of fiction should have the same demographic mix like reality.
After that, producers have been forced to rethink and take some extra rounds with the casting agents.
Nor is it entirely unlikely that this struggle for diversity borrowed some power from the metoo movement, which forced the industry to challenge old, ingrained thought patterns and tug at rigid hierarchies of power.
It's hard to imagine a backlash . The industry has started to grope for new glasses to see the world through and is not allowed to pull on the old ones again.