Organisers of the BFI London Film Festival believe they are moving in the right direction when it comes to gender representation in cinema, unveiling a festival programme in which 38% of the directors are women.
In 2016, a study conducted by the San Diego State’s Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film painted a bleak picture of gender equality within the film industry, revealing that a meagre 7% of the Top 250 highest grossing movies of 2016 were directed by women. The disparity between male and female directors in Hollywood is immense and the study also revealed that women made up just 24% of producers, 17% of editors, 13% of writers and 5% of cinematographers.
At the 2018 BAFTAs, there were no women nominated in the Best Director category for the fifth year in a row and at the 90th Academy Awards earlier this year, Greta Gerwig became only the fifth woman to ever be nominated as Best Director. Several European festivals also have some shocking figures, with only one of the twenty-one films in contention at the Venice Film Festival being directed by a woman and only three out of the twenty directors appearing at Cannes. The BFI London Film Festival has identified this issue and are clearly pushing for diversity and equality amongst those appearing at this year’s festival.
“We are moving in the direction we all want to be moving and we are seeing lots of really exciting new female film-makers coming through the programme,” says Tricia Tuttle, the artistic director for this year’s festival. “While we all want to move towards parity, we don’t want to set quotas for ourselves. We are trying to serve audiences and serve the programme and that is always at the heart of our curatorial process.”
What this means is that Tuttle and the BFI London Film Festival team are not attempting to shoehorn equality into their festival and that the wider variety of films and directors appearing at this year’s event has happened organically. Tuttle has stated that championing female talent and British cinema is something she is very proud of. “I love British film,” she said. “I’m a North Carolinian by birth but I’ve been here for 20 years and it always struck me when I came to this country how, at that time, the UK had no idea what an incredible film industry there was.”
The representation of female talent at this year’s BFI Film Festival is something all we should all be proud of, as the UK is showing the world that we are leading the charge when it comes to equality and diversity in cinema and hopefully, before long, the British film industry will be a shining example to production companies everywhere that talent comes in all shapes, sizes, colours and genders.
BFI London Film Festival will run from October 10th to October 21st 2018.
