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The digital platform on Tuesday unveiled a series of events at SXSW designed to further the industry equality agenda

Share The Screen Staff Picks Cinema is a 90-minute screening that will take place at the Vimeo Theater in the Austin Convention Center on March 11 and feature the work of seven female directors.

Programming will include a development partnership with New York-based film and media incubator Big Vision Empty Wallet to fund select participants in its Kickstart Diversity programme.

The initiative supports films, pilots, web series, and multi-platform projects with diverse teams through an incentive package that includes nationwide discounts and an exclusive distribution lab.

As part of the partnership, Vimeo’s development team will review all Kickstart Diversity projects, with the opportunity for select projects to receive dedicated funding in exchange for distribution on Vimeo On Demand.

And there will also be Vimeo’s first 2016 Share The Screen filmmaker investment with the acquisition of Marina Rice Bader’s film...

By Mary Malia for YourTango.com

A lesbian-themed film won at Cannes. Wow! How is that possible? Why did it happen? Is it a film that shows the reality of lesbian life, love and coming out? Or does it pander to heterosexual ideas of lesbian love and turn lesbian sex into a porn show?

Abdellatif Kechiche's "Blue Is The Warmest Color" walked off with two trophies at this year's Cannes film festival: the Palme d'Or and a special award for its two lead actresses, Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux.

Lesbian film is taking off. The quality of films coming out in this genre is growing. The actors involved are well-known in the industry, often award winners themselves. The cinematography is increasingly well-done and often amazingly beautiful. The scripts are well-written and the acting has moved from amateurish and stilted to experienced and smooth, with excellent story-telling and directing.

Lesbian-themed...

It was a simple question: “Why aren’t there more lesbian films out there?” And “Elena Undone” came into being as the result of my falling in love after a fair four decades on the planet — really, truly, madly in love with my partner, Marina Rice Bader, (also executive producer), who asked it.

“Well,” I responded, with a wry sense of compassion (and, yes, patronizing cynicism) — after all, she had been straight all her life, had no insight into the labyrinthian dysfunctionality of the lesbian nation nor the especially harsh economic feasibility, politics and vicious scarcity issues as they applied to “lesbian cinema.” The harsh truth about the “new distribution paradigm for this niche category” is that to make any money at all you can shoot these “niche” films only at budgets of 250,000 or less, and when you’re playing in that price range (ours was “or less”), you’re...

Filmmaker Nicole Conn (Claire of the Moon, Little Man) is doing her part to put lesbians in the record books, one extra-long kiss at a time.

Her new project, Elena Undone, follows a well-known lesbian writer who falls for the wife of a pastor. It was conceived by Conn and her partner, Marina Rice Bader, on a weekend getaway when Bader asked, "Why aren't there more lesbian movies out there?" The two decided to "give it a go," and Elena Undone was born.

In her new film, Conn wanted to capture the power and magic behind a monumental first kiss, and ended up shooting a 3:24 long kissing scene that breaks the record for longest kiss in cinema history, originally set back in 1941 by — naturally — a heterosexual couple.

Conn, the writer and director recently told us about the inspiration behind the history-making kiss she filmed and gave us a first look at the scene.