20 YEARS OF RECLAIM THE FRAME
Reclaim The Frame celebrated its 20th anniversary on International Women’s Day 2025.
Reclaim The Frame began life in 2003 as Birds Eye View, a short film event co-founded by Rachel Millward and Pinny Grylls.
In March 2005, Rachel Millward launched Birds Eye View annual feature film festival, showcasing films by emerging women filmmakers from around the world, it became the UK's first major film festival for female filmmakers, placing them at the heart of the creative vision.
2005
2014
2025
Over the next eight years, the film festival made great strides spotlighting the wealth of often unsung female creative talent from around the world, as it raised awareness of the issue of deep gender inequity in the film industry where women made up just 7% of directors and 12% of writers at the time.
During this period, Birds Eye View Awards were presented to the best fiction feature, documentary, and short film selected by juries of leading industry figures and film critics. Winners included Franny Armstrong’s Best Documentary Age of Stupid (2009), Sam Taylor-Wood’s Love You More, (2009), and Best Newcomer Sarah Polley’s Away From Her (2007).
For the penultimate edition in 2013, the festival celebrated Arab women filmmakers - the first female-led programme to focus on this region - including work by Haifaa Al Mansour (Wadjda), Annemarie Jacir (When I Saw You) and Leila Kilana’s debut (On The Edge).
Alongside promotion, professional development training was introduced as a means of re-balancing the film industry and helping more women to gain entry.
In 2014 the festival’s Artistic Director, Kate Gerova co-founded Filmonomics, our successful bespoke business-training programme.
In 2015, Birds’ Eye View became a year-round operation as we sought to increase our impact on gender inequality through a UK-wide audience development programme.
That same year the charity undertook a new phase of work funded by the British Film Institute, under our Reclaim The Frame banner. We developed impactful and inclusive campaigns to build audiences for films we support, and developed safe and accessible spaces for conversation around gender inequality and social injustice.
Since 2017 our profile raising efforts have been boosted through our development of Impact Producer networks across the UK to de-centralise the curation and delivery of Reclaim The Frame.
At the same time we started to develop a more effective programme of community outreach: in the first year of the pandemic in 2020 we were awarded a grant from the London Community Response Fund for a London wide community outreach pilot project.
In 2021 Melanie Iredale joined Reclaim The Frame as Director and put intersectionality, decentralisation and internationalism centre stage, and expanded our remit to include all marginalised genders.
With the support of the British Council we took Reclaim The Frame overseas for the first time, launching our Reclaim The Frame x International project which saw us partner with women’s film festivals across Asia and the Arab regions and the UK through exhibition and training.
The titles were screened to 3.6k audiences at over 40 events - each enhanced by Q+As, panel sessions and talks. Finally, we rebranded Birds Eye View to Reclaim The Frame, to better reflect our mission.
From 2022, our team expanded to recruit eight additional Impact Producers: grassroots marketeers based in each nation and region with the aim to decentralise the curation and delivery of Reclaim The Frame, reaffirming our long-held belief that impactful connections and outreach is best achieved through local relationships and lived experiences in the cities in which we work.
OUR IMPACT
Between 2017 and 2025, Reclaim The Frame has supported over 125 titles, including many important ground-breaking, boundary-defying, issue-driven, award winning releases such as: such as Booksmart, The Souvenir, For Sama, Queen and Slim, Nomadland and Rye Lane.
Our support for these releases has generated over 40K admissions from 1k in-cinema events, two thirds of which have been outside London.
Ratings have remained consistently high throughout this period with 92% rating the events and 92% rating the films 4 or 5/5 (from 6K+ surveys).
Furthermore these events have attracted significant numbers of young and diverse cinemagoers: 68% Female, 5% non-binary/gender queer, 35% 16-30 year olds, 26% Global Majority, 26% LGBTQIA+, 25% Disabled and 14% Disadvantaged.
Reclaim The Frame has made a meaningful impact over the past 20 years, but there’s still a long way to go. In 2024, only 20% of films were directed or co-directed by women or people of marginalised genders - a figure that mirrors the six-year average. The picture is similar for screenwriting: while the six-year average also stands at 20%, the percentage dropped to just 18% in 2024.
Our campaign to end gender inequality continues as we build upon past success, growing the Reclaim The Frame community and broadening perspectives of the world around an inclusive UK and global cinema culture.
80% of our activity is accessible
20%
80%
Proportion of activity that is accessible to D/deaf and disabled audiences
4 or 5/5 star event ratings
92%
4 of 5/5 star rating, out of 6000+ surveys
Cinema admissions
26,000
14,000
26,000 outside of London