According to DigitalSpy, IMDb has adopted a ‘feminist’ film rating with the sole purpose of highlighting the role of women in cinema. Sound awesome? That’s because it is.
The rating, first created in 2014, called the ‘F-rating,’ was created by Holly Tarquini of the Bath Film Festival with the intention of showcasing powerful women in film. And it is working. Since being employed by IMDb, around 21,800 films have been marked with the rating so far.
When asked why the rating was created, Tarquini said that “the F-rating is intended to make people talk about the representation of women on and off screen” and is determined using the famous Bechdel test. The test, which requires any work of fiction to have at least two women who talk to each other about something besides a man, is “designed to examine the percentage of which movies are written, directed and starred in by women”, DigitalSpy writes.
So far a few movies that passed this test in its entirety are Frozen, Bridget Jones’s Baby and American Honey. And it will only grow from there. “Our goal is to reach the stage when the F rating is redundant because 50 percent of the stories we see on screen are told by and about film’s unfairly under-represented half of the population – women,” Tarquini notes.
Well, this is definitely a step in the right direction.