On the occasion of the 33rd European Film Awards on 12 December, the European Film Academy is introducing a new award category – the EFA Award for Innovative Storytelling. In its first edition, the award is presented to director Mark Cousins for WOMEN MAKE FILM: A NEW ROAD MOVIE THROUGH CINEMA.

With this award, the European Film Academy wishes to pay tribute to a ground-breaking documentary produced by Hopscotch Films, a 14-hour odyssey introducing the viewer to many amazing but often overlooked female auteurs of cinema.

Using almost a thousand film extracts from thirteen decades and six continents, Mark Cousins asks how films are made, shot and edited; how stories are shaped and how movies depict life, love, politics, humour and death, all through the compelling lens of some of the world’s greatest directors — all of them women.

The European Film Academy introduces this new category to reflect the changes in the cinematic landscape and to celebrate the great innovative achievements in European storytelling. “The cultural narrative of the history of cinema has largely been viewed from the male perspective since the movies began over a century ago,” says EFA Chairman Mike Downey, “Mark Cousins' completely epic and utterly essential WOMEN MAKE FILM, is not only a long overdue redressing of the balance, it is in itself an inspiring and revisionist history of cinema, which puts women directors right back where they belong - at the epicentre of the story of film.  And yet it is far more than that:  it’s an alternative film school which, through the prism of the female gaze, teaches us the themes and techniques of cinema, but using only women filmmakers as examples.  EFA is proud to present the EFA Award for Innovative Storytelling to the director of WOMEN MAKE FILM - Mark Cousins.”

Mark Cousins will be guest of honour at the awards ceremony on 12 December to accept the award.