Two directors kept motherhood secret from colleagues to prove themselves
Teodora Ana Mihai and Sode Yukiko, both with films at the Tokyo International Film Festival, said they hid pregnancy and new motherhood from co-workers, citing the pressure to prove themselves.
Two women directors with films at this year's Tokyo International Film Festival have said they once kept pregnancy or new motherhood hidden from the people they worked with. Belgium-based Teodora Ana Mihai, whose film « Heysel 85 » plays in competition, and Japanese director Sode Yukiko made the admission at a festival talk on raising children while making films.
Both described a sense that their professional standing would be questioned if colleagues knew they were mothers. Mihai said she felt she « needed to prove myself three times more » than her male peers, a pressure that led her to keep her personal life largely out of view on set and in meetings. Sode spoke of a similar reluctance to reveal her circumstances while she was working on her projects.
The panel, which took place during the festival, offered a rare public discussion of how the film industry still treats mothers who direct. For many women in the field, the choice to remain silent about family life is presented as a strategy for being taken seriously rather than a personal preference.
The conversation touched on the practical difficulties that follow from such secrecy, including the strain of managing childcare while maintaining the appearance of uninterrupted availability. Both directors suggested that the expectation of constant commitment, common across film production schedules, makes it harder for women with young children to remain in demanding creative roles.
Their remarks come at a time when festivals and industry bodies in several countries have been discussing working conditions and support for parents, though the talk itself focused on personal experience rather than policy. The directors framed their accounts as a reflection of how things have been, and as an invitation for the industry to make it easier for women to speak openly about their lives outside the film set.
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