The London Film Festival said Thursday it was championing female directors, as half of the official competition films were made by women.
Around 38 percent of the movies screened across the whole festival are directed by women, up from 24 percent last year.
The 62nd London Film Festival, which runs from Oct. 10 to 21, features 225 movies from 77 different countries.
It will showcase films including the world premiere of Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, marking the centenary of the end of World War I.
The film features restored and hand-colored archive footage, bringing to life the realities of death and survival in the trenches.
The festival kicks off on the red carpet with the European premiere of Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen’s Widows, starring Viola Davis, Liam Neeson and Colin Farrell.
Can You Ever Forgive Me? by director Marielle Heller, a darkly humorous biopic about an audacious literary forger, starring Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant, gets a headline gala screening.
Capernaum by Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki, the Cannes Film Festival’s Jury Prize winner which depicts a journey into subterranean areas of Beirut, gets the Debate Gala screening slot.
The world premiere of Stan and Ollie, about the Laurel and Hardy double-act’s 1953 UK tour, closes the festival, which is run by the British Film Institute (BFI).
Ten films are in the official competition, including Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s thriller Shadow, and The Old Man and the Gun starring Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek and Casey Affleck.
Five of the 10 films have female directors or co-directors, with movies by Cristina Gallego, Karyn Kusama, Alice Rohrwacher, Sudabeh Mortezai and Dominga Sotomayor.
“Of all the films in the world, we have selected a very small number of films to be in the competition — because we see something special in these directors’ work — and 50 percent of them are women. I think that speaks volumes,” said the BFI’s chief executive Amanda Nevill.