Women take centre stage behind and in front of the camera in festival line-up

● Choices based on ‘merit not tokenism or box-ticking’ says director as city prepares to host stars on the red carpet

Glasgow Film Festival organisers are to tackle the debate over gender equality in the movie industry by devoting an entire day to female actors, writers and directors – as part of a line-up featuring films starring Tilda Swinton, Kelly Macdonald, Juliette Binoche, Catherine Deneuve, Anna Friel, Celia Imrie, Rosamund Pike and Imogen Poots.

Organisers say the festival, which is being staged for the 16th time between 26 February and 8 March, will “boast more films made by women than ever before”, but will also focus heavily on films with women in the lead roles.

It will be bookended for the first time by films by female directors, Coky Giedroyc’s adaptation of Caitlin Moran’s best-selling novel How to Build a Girl, the festival’s curtain-raiser, and closing gala Proxima, French filmmaker Alicewinocour’sdramaabout an astronaut – played by Eva Green – torn between her professional ambitions and the pressures of motherhood.

The final day of the festival will be devoted to female talent on and off screen to coincide with International Women’s Day.

The programme includes the big-screen adaptation of The Sopranos, Alan Warner’s novel about a group of Highland schoolgirls running wild in Edinburgh, the unveiling of a 14-hour documentary on cinema’s forgotten female filmmakers, narrated by Swinton and Jane Fonda, Pike’s portrayal of the Polish scientist Marie Curie in the film Radioactive, and Macdonald’s starring role in Outback-set romantic drama Dirt Music.

The festival will provide the launchpad for Perfect 10, the feature film debut of Scottish writer-director Eva Riley, which explores the events which unfold when a teenage gymnast’s world is turned upside down with the arrival of the half-brother she never knew she had.

Deneuve and Binoche will star alongside each other as a mother and daughter at loggerheads in The Truth, while Friel will star alongside Scottish actor Dougray Scott as the parents of London city trader David Tait in Sulphur and White, which will recall how his professional success marked a traumatic past.

Allison Gardner, co-director of the festival, insisted the was not jumping on a “bandwagon” with its programme this year, but was instead reflecting a long-standing commitment to diversity.

She said: “This is very much in line with our ethos. We always want a broad range of films in the festival, which is a very broad church. We try very hard to look for films that are made by women, but they only make 10 per cent of feature films.

“Since our closing day is International Women’s Day we thought it was an opportunity to make that day all about women, so every film in the line-up is either written or directed by a woman, or features women in lead roles.

“We wanted to shine a line in a more interesting and thoughtful way rather than doing a 50-50 programme.

It’s great as an aspiration, but I don’t like box ticking.

“I think we always have to programme without prejudice. All the films we have programmed are there on merit – they’re not there by tokenism.

“The one thing I didn’t want was to make a female strand of the festival. I don’t think the vast majority of audiences care about that.

“They want to see good films

– it doesn’t matter to them if it is directed by a man or a woman. Our job is to find those films and put them in front of an audience.

“We really try to represent our audience and encourage an audience from a vast range of backgrounds.

“When you come to see this festival you see a very diverse group of people, much more than other festivals, which can