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
Showcasing films by emerging women from around the world, at BFI Southbank and across London, the film festival made great strides spotlighting the wealth of often unsung creative talent globally, 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.
Gurinder Chadha was long-time Patron of the festival and recipients of the Birds’ Eye View Awards over the years included filmmakers Sarah Polley, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Kim Longinotto and Marjane Satrapi, to name a few.
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 and Annemarie Jacir.
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, Kate Gerova, Artistic Director 2013-15, co-founded Filmonomics, which continues to run as our flagship business-training programme.
In 2017, under Mia Bays’ leadership as Director at Large (2017-21), Birds’ Eye View became a year-round and UK-wide operation, marking a significant evolution for the charity and increasing our impact on gender inequality through a UK-wide audience development programme, supported by the BFI. Entitled Reclaim The Frame, the project continues to develop impactful and inclusive campaigns to build audiences for the films we support, offering safe and accessible spaces for conversation and community building.
Birds’ Eye View’s training offer also expanded, with Mia founding Future Leaders in Distribution, a continued professional development and mentoring programme for women execs in the sector.
In 2021 Melanie Iredale joined as Director, bringing a focus on intersectionality, decentralisation, and internationalism, and expanding our remit to champion filmmakers of all marginalised genders.
Since 2022, all activity now runs under the auspices of our call to action: Reclaim The Frame.
As of 2025, Reclaim The Frame continues to collaborate with distributors, with recent release campaigns including Raine Allan Miller’s Rye Lane, Ava DuVernay’s Origin, Molly Manning Walker’s How To Have Sex, Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun, and Nia DaCosta’s Hedda, amongst others, while our increasing advice and consultancy services offer support in helping projects to identify and reach audiences.
In addition to a calendar of events at a network of over 20+ cinemas in 16 cities across the UK, Reclaim the Frame x International works with British Council and global partnerships to take our shared mission overseas.
Reclaim The Frame is supported by the BFI, awarding National Lottery funding, and by Awards For All, British Council, Garfield Weston Foundation and ScreenSkills.
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 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