Opportunities for women to direct — a specialty that has, as long as film and TV have been around, been overwhelmingly dominated by men — are more widespread than they were generations ago. But the numbers are nowhere near a place suggesting an equal playing field. A study published in May by the University of South Carolina’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s Inclusion Initiative found, for instance, that a mere 11% of the globe’s top-grossing films over the last decade were helmed by women.

Rachel Noll James and Sienna Beckman have been addressing the lack of opportunity for female-identifying filmmakers for nearly a decade with the Washington- and London-based Emergence Films, an organization they co-founded whose mission is to “revolutionize the way women conceptualize, make, distribute, and market independent media.”

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Photo credit: Emergence Films