In the past year, two new documentaries have highlighted the rise of cannabis medicine for treating cancer and women’s leadership in the growing legal industry. According to the filmmakers, however, online censorship and business stigma are creating a smokescreen between the films’ hard-fought messages and the public they’re meant to reach.
Directors Abby Epstein and Windy Borman say that even though their films center on childhood cancer and on women’s entrepreneurship, respectively (and not legalization, or fat blunts), they’ve still faced ongoing confusion from investors and censorship on social media simply because they talk about weed.
Borman, whose documentary Mary Janes: The Women Of Weed began festival screenings late last year, said that she’s encountered hesitance and social-media snafus since day one, despite the film’s focus on women leaders in what is an openly booming field. “We’re a film about female entrepreneurship, which just happens to be about cannabis.”
