International Women’s Day & F-Rating
8 Mar 2022
In 2022, we continue to support and use the F-Rating for films we screen in our cinema.
The F-Rating is applied to films by us as an easily identifiable label so you can choose films that fairly represent women on screen and behind the camera. It is applied to all films which are directed by women and/or written by women. If the film ALSO has a significant woman on screen, it receives a Triple F-Rating, a gold standard so to speak. The rating highlights to you, as the audience, female driven films and you can then “vote with your seat” to proactively choose to go and see F-Rated films.
It is as clear as ever that the cinematic industry needs to continue using something like this, it’s hard to deny that to properly reflect our diverse culture the stories we see on screen need to be told by a broad spectrum of people. We hope by helping female filmmakers gain recognition through the F-Rating we can continue to empower others to follow in their footsteps. Following the motto of F-Rating; “If she can see it, she can be it”.
The F-Rating is inspired by the four Swedish cinemas in 2013, who decided to apply an A rating to films that passed the Bechdel test, developed by the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, which asks whether a piece of fiction has at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. However the founder of the F-Rating, Holly Tarquinii, director of Bath Film Festival where the F-Rating was first created, found that the Bechdel could be quite restrictive, “Gravity, for example, doesn’t pass it because Sandra Bullock doesn’t talk to any other women, and yet she’s clearly an amazing female lead…We wanted to take it a step further and highlight films which either had a senior figure in production who was female – a director or a screenwriter – or had very strong female leads or women’s issues.”
Of the top-grossing 51 films of 2021, a total of 55 directors were attached with 12.7% (7) women and 87.3% (48) men, a gender ratio of 6.8 to 1. So, there is clearly some way to go before we see equality in the film industry. What we hope is that by highlighting films as being F-Rated we will send a clear message to distributors, producers and funders that women can and should be more than just a supporting roles within the industry.
In conjunction with International Women’s Day – our screening of The Souvenir: Part II has received a Triple F-Rating. The film, written and directed by Joanna Hogg, starring Tilda Swinton and Honor Swinton Byrne, is screening at the Gulbenkian Cinema Wed 9 Mar 2022, 7pm – book your tickets here: https://thegulbenkian.co.uk/events/the-souvenir-part-ii/
