Michael Moore Equates Hollywood Gender Inequality to ‘Apartheid’

During a Q&A at the New York Film Festival Sunday, director Michael Moore addressed Hollywood’s much publicized gender disparities, and compared a lack of female directors to a form of segregation.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Moore said, “It’s amazing, really, that women are so nice, or that any of us have throats left.”

“I mean, seriously, we’re lucky,”  that only 1.9% of the top grossing 100 films in the past two years were helmed by women, said the director.

Moore then called on the Writer’s Guild and Director’s Guild of America to intervene and do something about it, saying film is the “most liberal of all industries,” before chiding film as “so shamelessly white and male.”

“I’m not saying that just because I’m a liberal making a politically-correct statement; I’m saying it as a filmgoer and audience member,” explained Moore. “I’m missing out on her story. Their stories. That person. When you block out whole groups of film by that cinema, what are the great films that you and I are missing because their great voices can’t be heard? I want to go to that movie. I want to hear that voice. I’m being denied that voice by a system that’s sent out to give the reins to white men.”

“I’m telling you, anthropologists are not gonna look kindly on us. We’re gonna look like Neanderthals, and they’re gonna say, ‘Even the liberal ones, the liberal ones let 1.9 percent of the majority gender make movies,’” Moore concluded. “It’s a form of apartheid, folks, when a minority controls everything and the majority gets a bone thrown to them. That’s just absolutely wrong.”

Moore announced in September in Toronto he was joining Meryl Streep’s Equal Rights Amendment advocacy. The director was at the New York festival promoting his upcoming film, Where to Invade Next.