Three layers, one on top of another, and almost nothing in the sector built for the third.

The industry has accepted that women are underserved across the screen sector. It has accepted that women from underrepresented communities face more than that again.

A woman who is also from a faith or minority community meets a third layer on top, and it is practical, cultural and representational at once. Prayer and fasting are not in the schedule. Dress gets negotiated on the day, badly. Nobody in the building knows whether the food is a problem. And when her community does appear on screen, it appears as shorthand, written by people who have never sat in its front rooms.

The first two layers have organisations working on them. The third has almost nothing. That is the gap Screen Sisters was formed to work in.

The industry has not built the door. Doors are built for people the people building them already know, and the accommodations that would make a set workable for a woman who prays or fasts have not been written down anywhere a line producer would find them.

Some communities have not encouraged their women through it either. Film is treated as something other people's daughters do, and a career in it is hard to explain at home when nobody in the family has seen what it looks like from the inside.

Both of those are structural rather than anybody's fault, and both can be worked on. We work on both. The industry side is addressed by writing the practice down and by putting trained women in front of people who hire. The community side is addressed by going to the building, bringing the family in, and showing them the work.

Screen Sisters CIC, incorporated 15 January 2025. A community interest company limited by guarantee, with an asset lock.

Two things happen here and both are legitimate. Some women want the work: we train them to the standard of high-end television and feature film, and we open the door to anyone who has never been on a set. Training is fully funded and that is filed with our constitution.

Others have no intention of working in film and every intention of being represented honestly. They hold a story, or their community does. That is a complete position, and the Story-to-Screen Lab is built for it.

Screen Sisters supports women of faith — Jewish, Christian and Muslim — and those who share our values. Women of no faith are in the room on the same terms. Prayer breaks go on the call sheet. Fasting is planned into the schedule. Catering is settled before the day, not at lunchtime.

Our base is in East London and our reach is not. Technical days run inside the industry's own buildings.

The point is not that a story gets made once. It is that the skill to tell the next one stays in the community that told it, whether or not anyone there ever works in the industry.

So the people a film is about are in the making of it, the consent is written and specific, and what a community learns in the process belongs to that community afterwards.

We partner and collaborate with Futures in Film CIC, and Screen Sisters works on its projects and activities. The Story-to-Screen Lab is a joint programme.

The two companies are legally separate. Each holds its own money, risk and equipment, they share a director, and what passes between them is agreed in writing. Screen Sisters is not a department of anything.

Two directors, a studio agreement in our own name, and a good deal standing beside us that belongs to somebody else. We describe the arrangement, not the asset.

We could not find a UK evaluation that answers the question we care about, so we are answering it ourselves.

What a woman could do before, what she can do after, where she went next, and whether the community a film came from recognised itself in it.

Programmes are for women. The building is open to everyone: the screenings and the events are for men, families and congregations.