In condemning the lack of gender balance in films (This year, I’m going on a new cinematic diet, 7 January) Alice O’Keeffe refers to the “measly 4% of female directors on the top 100 grossing films of 2018”. That is indeed depressing, but if you take a broader range of films, including the work of independent film-makers and films from around the world in languages other than English, then the picture is rather more cheering.
This is hardly scientific, but of the 56 films I saw in 2019, nearly all of them in Sheffield’s broad-ranging Showroom Cinema, 13 (23%) were directed, or in a couple of cases co-directed, by women and they included more than half of my favourite films of the year, namely Capernaum (Nadine Labaki), Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher), Birds of Passage (Cristina Gallego, with Ciro Guerra), For Sama (Waad Al-Kateab, with Edward Watts), The Farewell (Lulu Wang) and, bringing the year to a happy end, Greta Gerwig’s superb adaptation of Little Women.
Alex McMullen
Sheffield
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