2018 is gonna be a beautiful year for queer women in cinema

Between Adam Rippon, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and this rim job cartoon Piers Morgan repeatedly tweeted out, 2018 has had a spectacularly gay start.

In keeping with historical tradition, queer women have been noticeably less visible. There have been so few bright spots outside of Cynthia Nixon's possible earth-shattering gubernatorial run. The situation has become so dire that some of us in the queer women's community are considering drafting Timothée Chalamet and claiming him as one of our own.

Fear not, queer women and the humans who like them. The community is scheduled to make a subdued splash in 2018, and in one of the places they're least likely to be found — on screen.

With the exception of Carol and their starred PornHub collection, most Americans know no more than a handful of films featuring queer women. In 2017, GLAAD found that of the 2016's top films just 18% included LGBTQ characters. Of those, 83% were cis gay men. Lesbian representation increased by 35% in 2016 and bisexual representation by 13% — but the growth only appeared dramatic because previous representation was so minimal.

2017 saw some improvement, though most movies featuring queer women were relegated to the indie bubble. Blockbuster movies like Ghostbusters and Power Rangers hinted at their characters' queerness without doing anything explicitly and risking the wrath of the Great Middle American Consumer.

2018 will be better, even if just by default. Queer women dominated Sundance. At least 11 movies this year will feature a central queer female character, and so many of them are historical dramas. There's even a few films in my favorite category, lesbian misandrist homicidal psychopaths in love <3 <3.

Don't get me wrong — there's still so much room for growth. Most of these movies will be limited to indie audiences. Representation of disabled folks, trans women, and queer women of color is painfully limited and bad. Do better.

Still, there's something to hold onto here. Here's a brief preview of what's to come.

1. Disobedience




Disobedience is the perfect movie if you're the type of queer who loves a nice cold understated romance. Directed by Sebastián Lelio and featuring Rachel McAdams and Rachel Weisz, the film tells the story of two secret lesbian lovers (the best kind) who grow up in the Orthodox community in London. Disobedience premiered at TIFF to generally positive reviews, though Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson added a hesitant qualification: "the film goes past solemn ... and enters the realm of almost non-feeling."

The film is scheduled to be released in the United States on April 27, 2018.


2. Becks



Back when I was in college, lesbians and acoustic guitar musicians were basically synonymous. Which is why I couldn't be happier to see this under-represented, delightfully stereotypical demographic represented on screen in Becks. The film features Lena Hall (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) as a Brooklyn musician who moves in with her mother after a relationship goes sour. It's only a quasi-musical, which shouldn't deter the Hamilton haters among us.

Becks was released on February 8th at theaters probably not near you. It's also available for rent or to buy on YouTube.

3. The Miseducation of Cameron Post



The Miseducation of Cameron Post has all the ingredients for an excellent queer film: an early '90s setting, Chloë Grace Moretz, and a painfully topical social issue — conversion therapy. (Thanks, Mike Pence.) The dramedy won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in January, with The Guardian branding it as "a panacea for gay kids for years to come."

Bonus: it was directed by Desiree Akhavan, co-creator of queer web series *masterpiece* "The Slope." It's also one of the few films on this list to prominent feature actors of color.

4. Lizzie



IMAGE: SUNDANCE INSTITUTE

Here's everything you need to know about this film:

- Chloë Sevigny as infamous misandrist maybe-murderer Lizzie Borden

- Kristen Stewart as her hot lesbian lover-housekeeper

- There's a nude execution scene.

- That's pretty much it.

Please ignore the mixed reviews that came out of Sundance, as well as Sevigny's own critiques of the film. This film is great by definition.

Roadside attractions will release Lizzie sometime this summer.

5. Vita and Virginia

In the genre of "melancholy literary queers in love," we have Chanya Button's Vita and Virginia, a British period drama that recounts the great romance between Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki) and Vita Sackwell West (Gemma Arterton). If you're not familiar with the romance, I highly encourage you to read selections from their queer love letters, like this one from West to Woolf:

"I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way…So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become.”

It is incredible how essential this film's 2018 release has become to me.

6. My Days of Mercy



My Days of Mercy is the ultimate film for those of us proudly identify as queer social justice warriors. Kata Mara plays an anti-death penalty activist who falls in love with Ellen Page, the daughter of a man on death row.

This plot is straight out my college creative composition class, and I am here for it. Did I mention that Mara's character is named .... Mercy?

Be still, teenage lit mag heart!

My Days of Mercy premiered at TIFF in 2017 to mostly positive if incredibly confused reviews. It's unclear when it'll be in wider release.

7. Tell it to The Bees

Fact (unproven, but still a fact): 1950's small-town Britain was a breeding ground for queer romances. Based on Fiona Shaw's novel, the film features Anna Paquin playing a doctor who falls in love with her patient's mother, played by Holliday Grainger.

The film reportedly blends social realism with magical realism to create the kind of queer melodrama we deserve. No word yet on its release date, but we (the dorks reading this article) will be waiting with bated breath.

8. Porcupine Lake



There can never be too many queer coming-of-age summer romances. Thankfully, we have Porcupine Lake, a modest Canadian indie which features two best friends who form a romance.

Not all queer teenagers fall in love with their best friends, but at risk of angering the queer pundit class, many of us do. Porcupine Lake premiered at TIFF in 2017 and will be made more widely available sometime this year.


9. Saturday Church



Saturday Church dispels with gender binary fiction to give us Ulysses, a 14-year-old kid trying to navigate his gender identity all while processing his parent's passing. To escape from the trauma, Ulysses retreats into a world of musical fantasy and finds community at Saturday Church, a program that serves LGBTQ youth.

While Saturday Church may not have a queer cis woman as its main, it represents the full LGBTQ spectrum, including trans and queer kids of color, who are far less likely to find representation on screen. Awesome.

Saturday Church came out in early January and is now available for purchase on YouTube and Google play.

10. Colette



IMAGE: JASON MERRITT/GETTY IMAGES

"Colette ranks as one of the great roles for which Keira Knightley will be remembered," Variety wrote of the film in January.

Either the reviewer is correct, or they didn't see Knight's 2003 masterpiece Bend it Like Beckham. Whatever. I am thrilled. Keira Knightly plays Colette, a brilliant writer married to a dominating, sometimes abusive Parisian named Willy (Dominic West). Knight has an affair with gender nonconforming Marquise de Belbeuf.

This country needs more historical dramas featuring literary queers in love. Thank God for this tiny part of 2018.

Bleecker Street will release the film on September 21, 2018.

11. Adam
I am skeptical of anyone who recommends YA fiction, having spent years trying to fend off John Green recommendations. Adam, a deeply funny queer and trans activist coming of age novel, might be one of the few exceptions. And now it's becoming a movie.

Rhys Ernst directed the film. It's set to make us actually laugh sometime in 2018.

12. A Fantastic Woman



Even though A Fantastic Woman came out at the end of 2017, it didn't fully hit theaters until 2018 so I'm including it on this list. Aaaaand I wanted to take the opportunity to loudly gush about actress Daniela Vega, the film's star who'll become the first out trans woman to present at the Oscars in 2018.

Vega plays a trans woman who is exiled by her family after her partner's passing. The Guardian called it a "vibrant combination of romance, fantasy and detective story" and a "huge step forward" for the trans community. Bonus: A trans actress actually plays a trans character, which is exceedingly rare in Hollywood films featuring trans characters. They'd much rather fawn over pretty boys like Eddie Redmayne and Jared Leto.

A Fantastic Woman is in theaters now. Go see it! And all the other films listed above. 2018 is going to be a bad year. At least we'll have these tiny loving films to keep us company until a better future arrives.

Hollywood is failing women when it comes to representing gender on screen, according to BBC analysis.

Fewer than half of the 89 films named best picture at the Oscars have passed a common measure of on-screen female representation known as the Bechdel Test.

A movie passes the Bechdel Test if there are at least two named female characters that have a conversation with one another about something other than a man.

This conversation needs to happen just once for it to pass.

The research also shows that a greater percentage of best picture winners passed the Bechdel test in the 1930s compared to the current decade.

Recent winners such as Moonlight, Gladiator and Slumdog Millionaire all fail the test, along with two of this year's best picture nominees, teams from BBC 100 Women and More or Less have found.

Darkest Hour fulfils the requirement to have two named female characters but at no point in the film do women have a conversation with each other about something other than a man.

Dunkirk, set during World War Two, doesn't have any named female characters.

Two actresses given a high billing - Miranda Nolan and Kim Hartman - instead play characters known as "Nurse" and "Stewardess" respectively.

Graphic showing that 51% of best picture winners fail the Bechdel Test
"I think people are doing what they always have done, telling stories that are similar to those they have seen before, without questioning it," says Ellen Tejle, who has introduced a rating system in Sweden to highlight films which pass the Bechdel Test.

"People in the industry need to realise that they have power and responsibility in the process of making a film."

Film correspondent and broadcaster Rhianna Dhillon says women should not end up being shoehorned into films about men.

"We deserve our own narrative. Darkest Hour is a male-centric film they shoehorned a female narrative in. Who are they doing that for?" she says.

"It's not good enough to start making a film before realising that it's just white men being represented."

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What is 100 Women?
BBC 100 Women names 100 influential and inspirational women around the world every year and shares their stories. Find us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and use #100Women

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The Bechdel Test is named after the artist behind the 1985 cartoon it first appeared in.

In Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, two women are discussing going to the cinema, when one reveals the details of her "rule" for picking what to watch.

Unable to find a film that meets her requirements, the two characters end up going home.

It was never intended to be a serious method of measuring representation, but is now a widely used theory in film criticism.

Bar chart showing the 1990s was the best decade for films passing the Bechdel Test
"I love that the Bechdel Test gets the conversation going about what's going on on screen," says Holly Tarquini, director of the Bath Film Festival and founder of the F-rating, which alerts audiences to a film directed by women and/or written by women.

"What's really difficult is that lots of very misogynist films pass it; it doesn't tell you anything about who's telling the story.

"A huge amount of pornography passes. The Bikini Carwash Company passes the Bechdel Test but Gravity doesn't."

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How the films were measured
The BBC 100 Women team reviewed dozens of films, using the standard Bechdel Test as a measure.

Information was also gathered and cross-checked from crowd-sourcing website bechdeltest.com.

Where a BBC reviewer had questions about the rating to give a particular film, or disagreed with bechdeltest.com, this was checked with at least two other BBC reviewers and a consensus reached.

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Ms Tejle uses the test at her cinema in Sweden and films that pass are given an A-rating.

"Many films pass in just one scene," she says.

"We have had a lot of angry emails and shout-outs, saying that a particular film 'shouldn't have passed because of just a few moments'.

"But that says something too, that people are looking for that scene and reacting - that means they paid attention and actually care. That for me is a success in itself."

Graphic showing eight out of 10 best picture winning films of the 1970s fail the Bechdel Test
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Others point out that the test only addresses gender, without asking whether characters are well-represented in other ways.

Corrina Antrobus, founder of the Bechdel Test Fest, says if she were to come up with a new way of testing films, "it would be something that better addresses intersectionality", a theory that considers the way different aspects of humanity such as ethnicity, class and sexuality, affect one another.

"It would be a measure of how few films portray women of colour, the spectrum of sexualities, religious backgrounds and abilities so that we can get a better snapshot of who is missing or being poorly represented at the table," she says.

According to analysis by the Annenberg Foundation, 34 of the top 100 films in 2016 depicted a female lead or co-lead.

Of those, just three were played by female actors from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group.

Nearly half of all 100 top films of 2016 evaluated were completely missing black female speaking characters (47 of 100) and two‐thirds or more were missing Asian females (66 of 100) and Latinas (72 of 100), the study found.

"In stark contrast, only 11 of the 100 top movies of 2016 were missing white girls/women on screen," the study said.

Graphic showing three out of 10 best picture winning films of the 1990s fail the Bechdel Test
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Forty-four of the 89 best Oscar picture winners pass the Bechdel Test, including Argo and Schindler's List.

In both of these examples, very few lines are actually spoken by women - it just so happens that one or two instances of conversation meet the requirements of the test.

Film critics and fans have debated how much the female characters need to say to one another, for it to constitute a pass.

For example, Spotlight, a film about a newspaper investigation into the cover-up of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests, proves contentious on the Bechdel Test website.

In one scene, journalist Sacha Pfieffer (played by Rachel McAdams) is asked for a glass of water by her grandmother, who is not given a first or last name in the credits.

One Bechdel test website user, Leigh, had this to say: "I don't think the grandmother asking for a glass of water in response to learning about the abuse by men in the church constitutes a pass."

User CA2MA disagrees, writing: "I actually think this glass of water scene is a critical and powerful sequence in the film.

"So while the grandmother isn't named, she is an important character - she is the voice of the average [Boston] Globe reader.

"The cover-up that she is reading about is larger than just about men. It is about thousands of people and the failure of an institution."

Equally, Forrest Gump provokes debate about whether two women talking about the veterans from the Vietnam War counts as them talking about men, or talking about an issue.

Graphic showing that more men than women speak in 24 recent best picture films
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While this research focuses on English-language and US films, it is interesting to note that studies from the Geena Davis Institute suggests that other film-making countries are having greater success in producing more gender-balanced films.

China had the highest number of gender-balanced movies, followed by Korea, UK, Brazil, and Germany, according to analysis of selected films released between 2010 and 2013.

However very few films worldwide are directed by women - and they include just one Oscar best picture winner.

And while Kathryn Bigelow picked up the best director award for The Hurt Locker in 2009, the film itself actually fails the Bechdel Test.

"For decades, there has been an assumption that women will go to see these films, whoever is in them, because that's all there is to watch," says Ms Dhillon.

"Meanwhile men can take their pick because they're always represented. Women are pigeon-holed but we don't realise because it's so subliminal."

Media captionHollywood is failing women when it comes to representing gender on screen

Ms Dhillon believes it will be a long time until Hollywood addresses its problems with representation, but films such as I, Tonya and and Black Panther give her hope.

"Black Panther is really exciting because its not made a by a small arthouse; this is a huge film from Marvel and Disney," she says.

Although the film isn't perfect, she points out, there are many examples of "intelligent and brave" women who are represented as the "norm".

"That's one of the reasons why audiences are so excited about it," she says.

There may be financial benefits for studios making films that are more representative, with some research suggesting that films with gender parity make more money per dollar spent on production.

"Dare to break the stereotypes," Ms Tejle tells the filmmakers of the future.

"You might even make a better film with a better story."

Reporting by Amelia Butterly, Sarah Buckley, Georgina Pearce and Charlotte McDonald. Data journalism by Will Dahlgreen.