When the British Independent Film Awards recently announced its 2025 nominations list, there was cheers from within the British industry as first-time filmmakers dominated each category. Akinola Davis Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow and Harry Righton’s Pillion (both feature debuts) led the nominees, while actor-turned-director Harris Dickinson’s Urchin and Laura Carrera’s On Falling also received strong support.
Regardless of how the trophies are handed out at BIFA’s awards ceremony at London’s Roundhouse this Sunday, the fact that so many new faces are vying for the top spots at British Independent Film, Director and Screenplay is a perfect fit for BIFA’s mission to support up-and-coming talent at the start of their careers.
However, amidst the celebrations, there were also complaints on social media about the 2022 awards, which have become gender-neutral in the leading and supporting categories. Of the 12 slots available (six each), only two were secured by women. Jennifer Lawrence, who starred in Die My Love (interestingly, the first Oscar winner and perhaps one of Hollywood’s most famous stars to be nominated for a BIFA), and Maxine Peake, who played a supporting role in I Swear.
BIFA has often been a trendsetter, or as they like to say, a “guinea pig” when it comes to categories. These were the first film awards to introduce casting awards in the UK, later followed by the BAFTAs and now the Oscars. And while they can’t claim to be the first to introduce a gender-neutral performance category (though their groundbreaking performance awards have always been this way), they announced their plans just weeks before the Independent Spirit Awards announced they intended to do something similar.
But does the dominance of men in these categories this year indicate that decisions need to be reevaluated?
Not so, argue Deena Wallace and Amy Gustin, co-chairs of BIFA. In fact, they claim that recent performance nominations are completely contrary to normal BIFA policy.
“This is actually a major anomaly for us,” Gustin says. “Usually it’s quite the opposite. And no one bats an eye. No one says look at these women shining and the men not getting attention. But as soon as it’s the other way around, the criticism comes.”
Statistics don’t lie. Last year’s lead performances were the complete opposite, with five women and one man. Overall, since becoming gender-neutral, the category has had 15 women nominated compared to five men (all three winners are women). In terms of supporters, there are 15 women nominated to every 10 men (a slot that previously allowed more candidates), and in 2022 there will only be one man out of eight women. There will also be a joint lead performance category that will be added in 2022, with four women and two men participating this year.
In fact, since BIFA went gender-neutral in 2022, of the 67 performers nominated in lead, supporting, and co-lead categories, 39 were women and 28 were men, giving 58% support for women.
“So this is actually a bit of an adjustment year,” Wallace said. “We’re getting closer to 50/50 in three years. But we’re not there yet.”
Like all film awards bodies, BIFA is in the final stages of the actual film production process, and any significant gender bias is more indicative of industry issues and trends than any serious flaws in the voting system or category arrangements (although, as BAFTA attested in the wake of 2020’s #BAFTASoWhite backlash, online critics rarely see it that way). Granted, 2025 may be unusually crowded in terms of BIFA performance nominations, but Wallace points out that 2025 submissions in these categories were unusually crowded, with numbers “well in excess” of 60% for lead, co-lead, and support categories overall.
“No one knows if this is a trend or because more male-led films are being commissioned,” she added. “But there’s a small chance that we’re the canary in the coal mine when it comes to things like that. If the genders are split into two categories, those trends are masked. We have to wait and look back over a longer period of time, but we wouldn’t notice if the genders were split.”
And while many complaints about male-skewed imbalances among candidates are often pinned on overwhelmingly male voter groups, in BIFA, once again, the opposite is true. “There are far more women voting for BIFA than men,” Wallace asserts. This year, 58% of the more than 600 candidate voters were women, and in the performance subgroup that determines candidates, 68% were women and non-binary. “So there aren’t a lot of young people making all these decisions.”
There are no major changes to this year’s main categories, but a new addition has been added in the form of the Cinema of the Year award, which celebrates the UK’s best independent cinemas. While awards season is in full swing, it may not be an award that many viewers care about, but it was BIFA’s first public vote, and Gustin said the addition was “huge.”
“We had no idea if anyone would care or how close movie theaters would be to us, and we thought there would probably be 40 movie theaters,” she says. In the end, more than 130 people applied. And when it came to the actual voting, over 100,000 votes were submitted (testing a bespoke system built by our partner Print.Work).
“But people weren’t just voting, they were leaving comments and love letters at the movie theater,” Gustin says. “We send all the feedback back to the theaters, and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, this makes me cry.’ So it was really amazing and adorable.”
