More Female Directors Than Ever To Screen At Nashville Film Festival

The upcoming Nashville Film Festival will be marked by a statistic that surprised its organizers: this year, more selected films than ever were made by female directors.

Artistic director Brian Owens says his team didn’t solicit more women to enter, and they didn’t pick movies according to any sort of filmmaker demographics. It just happened that way.

“I noticed it as the lineup was taking shape,” Owens says. “When the documentary lineup had finalized I was like, there’s some strong female filmmakers here.”

So he counted. Three-quarters of the feature-length documentaries the festival has chosen were made by women. That percentage lowers when you throw in fictional films, but it’s still higher than most festivals, with 45 percent of the movies directed by women.

“I don’t know if we’re sending out some positive vibes into the world that has a good number of female filmmakers applying,” Owens jokes. More likely, he says, it’s a sign of that things are finally changing in a traditionally male-dominated industry.