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Tribune News Service

Six years ago, Ally Pankiw got her first big television breakthrough: she directed the first season of the Netflix comedy-drama Feel Good.
But getting there was a slog. The Canadian writer and director recalls being told repeatedly that she could not land such jobs without first having directing experience in TV – a Catch-22 situation shared by many women and people of colour trying to break into the business.
Frustrated by that common refrain and motivated to push back against Hollywood’s larger diversity problem, Pankiw decided to take action.
She started to bring mentees to her sets, first paying them on commercial shoots from her own rate, then eventually asking film and TV productions to pay them as part of the budget. The idea was for those aspiring directors to shadow her on set and get that first-hand knowledge about an industry that is so often out of reach.
Pankiw’s individual efforts have now grown into Breadcrumbs, a mentorship programme she formally launched in late 2025 that helps up-and-coming women and non-binary directors get access to paid, credited shadowing opportunities on film, TV and commercial sets.

So far, she says, about 25 directors and production companies have signed a pledge to commit to these paid mentorship opportunities, including Nisha Ganatra, the director of Freakier Friday (2025), and Lilly Wachowski of The Matrix franchise.
“We get told the myth that we as female directors or diverse directors are competing against each other for a very small amount of jobs,” says Pankiw, 39, who grew up outside Edmonton, Alberta, and now splits her time between Los Angeles and Toronto. “We’re actually not each other’s competition. We need to make our piece of the pie as big as possible. And I think we’ve got to help each other get there.”
Pankiw’s efforts come as Hollywood has seen a further backslide in women’s employment.
According to a study from San Diego State University, in the United States, women made up just 13 per cent of the directors working on the top 250 films in 2025, down from 16 per cent in 2024.

Martha Lauzen, the study’s author and founder of the university’s Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film, has been tracking women’s employment as directors on the top-grossing Hollywood films for 28 years. During that period, she says, there has been little improvement.
Despite the success of such prominent directors and producers as Kathryn Bigelow, Ava DuVernay and Chloé Zhao, women remain vastly under-represented behind the camera.
“In looking at the numbers, I can only surmise that the major film studios do not view women’s underemployment as directors or in any of the other roles I track, including as editors, cinematographers, writers or composers, as a problem,” Lauzen wrote in an email. “If you don’t view something like severe gender inequality to be problematic, you’re not going to do anything significant to change it.”
For a time, there was some momentum on this issue, but as the industry faced an increasing number of headwinds, including the Covid-19 pandemic, the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023, and studio spending cutbacks, those efforts dwindled.
The lagging percentage of women film directors in 2025 is a clear sign that the industry is going backwards, says Kirsten Schaffer, CEO of Women in Film (WIF), which advocates for women in Hollywood. The group is supporting Pankiw’s Breadcrumbs initiative along with talent agency WME. The agency, which represents Pankiw, also contributed seed funding to WIF for the programme’s infrastructure, as well as legal language for mentorship inclusion negotiations.

“There’s no lack of talent,” Schaffer says. “It really is lack of opportunity.”
That is where Pankiw hopes Breadcrumbs can help. By showing them what these sets are like and how directors solve problems on the fly, she hopes mentees will be a little more fearless as they pursue their careers.
“I really hope it helps instil confidence in the people that join these sets and shadow,” Pankiw says.
“No one knows what they’re doing as they take the next step in their career, as they try something new. Everyone is learning on each new set.”


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Breaking into Hollywood was a slog. Ally Pankiw wants to make it easier for other women

Ally Pankiw speaks at a Women in Film panel at Acura House of Energy, in Park City, Utah, in January 2024. The director, who got her break in the Netflix series “Feel Good”, is now paving the way for other women and non-binary filmmakers with her mentorship programme, Breadcrumbs. Photo: Getty Images for Acura

Lilly Wachowski, who achieved fame with The Matrix, is among the directors who have pledged to commit to Breadcrumbs’ mentorship programme. Photos: courtesy of Netflix

Pankiw attends the premiere of her documentary film “Lilith Fair: Building A Mystery” at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Photo: Getty Images via AFP

Kirsten Schaffer (top, middle) with filmmakers (from left) Fawzia Mirza, Lana Wilson, Sydney Freeland and Pankiw at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Photo: Getty Images for IMDb

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Entertainment

Ally Pankiw set up Breadcrumbs to give up-and-coming women directors the on-set experience needed to break into a male-dominated industry


Ally Pankiw set up Breadcrumbs to give up-and-coming women directors the on-set experience needed to break into a male-dominated industry.


Breaking into Hollywood was a slog. Ally Pankiw wants to make it easier for other women

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Ally Pankiw set up Breadcrumbs to give up-and-coming women directors the on-set experience needed to break into a male-dominated industry

Ally Pankiw set up Breadcrumbs to give up-and-coming women directors the on-set experience needed to break into a male-dominated industry