Opening with an International Women's Day Gala at the National Film Theatre London on March 8th. www.birds-eye-view.co.uk

Writing a feature that celebrates women's contribution to film � as opposed to bemoaning the lack of said contribution � is not all that easy. For instance, try naming five major film directors who are women.

Well there are a couple of fairly obvious ones; Sofia Coppola, Jane Campion. And then if you know your independent cinema you could name Sally Potter and Lynne Ramsey. Plus there's Kathryn Bigelow, Hollywood 's action femme.

It's not impossible, but the point is that it's not easy either. Of that group, only Coppola could consider herself A-list, but as she's only made two features thus far, the jury is still out. Bigelow's last film was K19: The Widowmaker. Remember it? In fact, the first two names listed above represent two-thirds of the number of women who have been nominated for the Best Director Academy Award. Campion was nominated for The Piano and Coppola for Lost in Translation. The other was Lena Wurtm�ller for Seven Beauties in 1976. None of them won.

Seven percent of feature film directors are female. That's over half the world's population represented by less than a tenth of the main creative force in one of the world's most powerful mediums.

It was a figure much bandied around at the Bird's Eye View Film Festival in 2005, the first and only of its kind in the UK. One of the films screened at the festival was Jelly Dolly, the first feature by director Susannah Gent, who has yet another take on the gender question. She says: �I find my difficulty comes from making unusual and art-house work rather than my gender and I think I could imagine meeting a male art-house director and having the same frustrations and conversations about how you get work like that out there�.

Maybe we're overstating the problem? The idea of a women's film festival certainly proved controversial. On the filmmaker's network Shooting People, debate raged about the ethics of having a film festival open only to films by women. Is �positive discrimination' an anomalous term? Has Rachel Milward, festival organiser and creative energy behind Birds Eye View, by creating such a high profile event foregrounding women filmmakers, merely overplayed an issue that's not actually a problem? Well, let's explore a little further.

It's true that the question of women's representation in the film industry isn't a question of overtly sexist practices. It's not like the office s of movie moguls have signs on their doors saying �No Women Allowed'. In fact, women are well-represented in the industry overall. It's the breakdown of roles that seems to reveal a gender imbalance, and not only to the detriment of women. Looking at the UK industry by sector, 94% of make-up and hairdressing roles are taken by women, 80% in costume and over half in the area of production, which seems to reflect a tradition of gender-biased roles. This article could be just as valid as an article seeking the men in costume and make-up, but what makes the issue of women in film such a hot one is the importance of the director as the main creative and visionary force behind each film.

Says Milward: �I think a lot of people watch what they see and don't critically examine it; you just take it as if it's coming from a universally neutral zone. You just watch a film. What's really amazing is to start challenging that and to say �well, who's telling that story? And if that person's telling that story, what's their perspective?' We are impacted by the people who are making them. They're shaping that story and it is their vision that we're watching and that makes a difference to representation of the kinds of people we have on screen�. This is the sentiment of Bird's Eye View's educational programme, which aims to address the problem by taking the debate into schools, increasing awareness at a critical, opinion-forming age.

It's not all doom and gloom then. A recent survey of the UK film industry by training body Skillset showed a fairly substantial increase in the numbers of women working in traditional boy-zones such as camera (up from 10% to 18%) and sound (from 11% to 16%). But over a century after film changed the world, and 40 years since the feminist movement was supposed to do the same, feminism is now a dirty word and women directors are still few and far between, so surely we're entitled to ask the question why?

The reason that question has not been answered yet is that it's virtually impossible to find a compact formula that fits. Rachel Milward points to working practices in the film industry that prohibit anyone in a caring role (and it's mainly mothers) from pursuing top-level careers. But she also suggests that that could change: �We don't have to run shoots in exactly the same way with the same crazy hours. It doesn't have to be that way. If it's possible to not work until midnight every night, and to scream and shout and get no sleep, and eat no food, if it's possible to live a balanced life and make a film then maybe that would help�. She cites the example of Beeban Kidron, director of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, who managed to arrange her cutting room schedule in order to be around when her children got home from school. She had to be in the cutting room for 6.15am in order to do that, but as Milward proposes, it's a start: �I think as more women turn around and say �actually, no I can't work beyond those hours' then, as we have in other industries, we'll get more understanding for those kind of needs�.

It's certainly something that's on Susannah Gent's mind as she sits talking about future projects; she's six months pregnant. �There are certainly issues with women that I'm starting to consider now that I'm pregnant, that to become successful as a director you make a number of shorts, then you need to keep going at it and going at it and going at it. Things like having children probably have an impact, in terms of having a long-term career.� Her working methods on Jelly Dolly were slightly unorthodox, but successful, and point to possible alternatives available. As her film was self-funded, she had more control � on the one hand. On the other, the ultra low budget meant that she had to work around other people's commitments and the film ended up being shot in five chunks over a year, then edited on a borrowed digital suite. As she says, if she could work in the same way on her next feature, she could certainly do it around having a family. The problem is that she can't make another self-funded film, and with external funding comes external conditions.

With regard to other reasons for the curious absence of women filmmakers, Milward is pragmatically succinct. �A lot of it's about attitudes and people just being very happy with the status quo and being amazingly worried about changing that� I think that both being authority figures and being culture formers and people with that creative confidence is something that women are amazing at, but that women haven't really been encouraged to do for a very long time. That's not been part of the cultural roles for women.�

The other side of the efforts to improve the role of women in the world's most powerful medium is their representation on-screen. Talking about Jelly Dolly, which is the story of Audrey, a woman stuck in a dying relationship who retreats further and further into her own world of surreal visions and bizarre body appendages, Gent is adamant on the importance of telling women's stories. While she admits that Audrey isn't a particularly strong character, in that she's not pro-active or vaguely heroic, what's important for Gent is that it's her world that shapes the film, her story. �I'm pleased that I've made a film that has a strong women's view, and until I showed it to people I didn't realise how that would come across necessarily� People feel that it's a different style of communication and that it does come across as being from a woman.�

This debate has also raged for years, often centred on the arguments in Laura Mulvey's seminal 1975 essay, �Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', in which she put forward the psychoanalytic theory of the �male look'. The female becomes the passive object of the man's gaze, exacerbated by the fact that the director and cinematographer are most likely to be men. On a less academic level, studies show time and again the lack of substantial female roles that aren't defined by social status (wife, mother) or restricted to starlets in their twenties and thirties. So it becomes even more important that films such as Jelly Dolly can tell the story of a women whose social status is stalling and who can't easily be categorised. Rachel Milward agrees: �I was talking to Naomie Harris [actress] and she was saying how you have to be either the bitch or the mother or the sex goddess� you can't just be all of them, which most women are, really. We're all these things! And when you look at people like Al Pacino, or Robert de Niro and you look at the kind of characters they play and the kind of careers they've had that's like, oh come on, what women gets that? What woman plays that kind of character??�

We shared pet hates; hers is Something's Gotta Give, the Jack Nicholson/Diane Keaton film about growing old (dis)gracefully, mine is What Women Want, the Mel Gibson vehicle where he gets a bump on the head and is suddenly able to read women's minds, which turn out to be vacuous and rather self-centred on the whole. Imagine my surprise to find out both films were written by the same director � and a woman! It does make the battle for decent roles for women � both on and off screen � seem that much more of an uphill one.

Documentary maker Marilyn Gaunt has described women as �perennial pioneers�, comparing their one-step forward, two-steps back progression to Groundhog Day, and it certainly feels that way. She has some great examples of women documentary-makers, such as Margaret Thompson, Kay Mander and Muriel Box, who made ground-breaking films but then faded into relative obscurity next to their male contemporaries. So regardless of the ethical conundrum of a festival that actively excludes work from men, at least it's doing something to end this historical silence. Gent agrees: �It's just about balance for me I think, and I think it's imbalanced�.

If the quality of work at Birds Eye View events is anything to go by, then only a minor catastrophe could stop that imbalance from being redressed. Recent events have also been encouraging, from the 2004 Sundance Festival where 10 out of the 14 documentaries were made by women, to Andrea Arnold's 2005 Oscar success with her short film Wasp. Whatever the reasons for the lack of a female presence in film so far, there are plenty of women out there who are determined to change that.

With thanks to Marilyn Gaunt and Sue Dunderdale for the information on early women filmmakers.

For news and future screenings of Jelly Dolly, check out the website: www.jellydolly.co.uk

After our groundbreaking women's film festival in London in March 2005, Birds Eye View is preparing for a more extended series of festival events throughout 2006, opening with an International Women's Day Gala at the National Film Theatre, London on March 8th at 8.10pm.

To find out more about Birds Eye View go to www.birds-eye-view.co.uk