As clearly illustrated by the New York Film Academy, only 8% of directors of general feature releases are women. And so, in response to this evident disparity, the Birds Eye View Film Festival was created, which began as just an hour-long event filled with shorts by emerging female filmmakers. Twelve years later, the festival continues to champion some of the brightest female filmmakers of our time.

Curator of the project ‘I am Dora’, Jemma Desai, has teamed up with Birds Eye View to offer a special screening of the feature film Girlfriends, by Claudia Weill. The movie has not been shown in the UK since it’s first release in 1978, and is the original predecessor of some of today’s cult favorites, like Frances Ha and Girls. The tale of two girlfriends growing up and drifting apart in New York City is one of the 19 films showing at the Birds Eye View Film Festival’s 10th edition, whose theme this year is Girls, Guns, Artists, Icons.