Find out more about the F-Rated podcast here:
A brief history of the F-Rating
Founded by Holly Tarquini in 2014, the F-Rating is a film rating awarded to films directed by and/or written by women. If the film also stars significant women in their own right, the film is Triple F-Rated, our gold standard.
The aim of the rating is to highlight films where the main person telling the story is a woman; to encourage film exhibitors to F-Rate their programme; to help film goers easily find films directed and written by women and ultimately to change the stories we see on screen, therefore influencing our culture and making it more equal.
Born in 2014 at Bath Film Festival (now FilmBath), initially we thought of simply rating our festival films if they passed The Bechdel Test – as Ellen Tejle, the director of Bio Rio, an art-house cinema in Stockholm’s trendy Södermalm district had in 2013.
The Bechdel Test (which examines whether films have at least 2 women in it, whether they have a conversation with each other and whether this discussion concerns something other than a man) however is solely based on a cartoon from 1985 by Alison Bechdel, and these three questions fail to tell us anything about the storyteller – arguably the most influential person in the production.
Following on from the Hollywood Report in 2013 which showed that fewer than 5% of the top 200 films were directed by women, we wanted to ignite discussions around who is telling the stories we see on screen and the roles of women in bringing them to life.
And so the F-Rating was born.
Hoping for some coverage of the F-Rating and anticipating a call from the Bath Chronicle, we were suddenly swamped by the world’s media.
Expecting personal death and rape threats (the usual social media reaction to the word ‘feminist’) we were completely overwhelmed by the positivity and support the strand received: no one seemed to have a bad word to say.
The nature of the F-Rating is inherently positive, highlighting and drawing attention to all of the amazing women in film.
The year after our launch in 2015, we invited all of the film festivals and cinemas in the UK to F-Rate their programme. There are now over 100 organisations who use the F-Rating to highlight women’s work in their programme.
In 2016 the founder of the rating, Holly Tarquini was invited to deliver a TEDx talk.
In 2017, IMDb, the biggest film website in the world, added the keyword F-Rated to over 25,000 titles and the world’s press went mad again!
Find out more about the 2023 F-Rated Podcast here.
Here is the F-Rating website, plus our Facebook Page and Twitter feed: enjoy!
If you are an exhibitor, distributor or producer then you can join the F-Rating for free by emailing holly@filmbath.org.uk