A huge thank you to our sponsors of this year’s Top Women In Global Cinema, IMAX.

For the last five years, Celluloid Junkie has published its annual Top 50 Women in Cinema list, to celebrate and shine a spotlight on the talent and achievements of women in the global cinema industry. Recognition of the list has, we’re proud to say, grown since its inception and each year we’ve received a growing number of nominations from both male and female colleagues around the world. 

To that end, the first quarter of each year at Celluloid Junkie is usually spent agonizing over the many different and deserving nominations we receive, the formation of the list and a publishing deadline. 

Cue 2020, the year that there are many adjectives for, very few of them positive. Aside from throwing many spanners into all kinds of works, COVID-19 has meant the last year feels as though we’ve all been through the wringer in more ways than one. And the usual format of the ranked Top Women list posed a difficult challenge, one that didn’t feel appropriate for obvious, pandemic-shaped reasons. 

But now that the light at the end of the longest tunnel ever is steadily getting brighter, we didn’t want to do away with the list entirely so we’re excited to bring back a slightly different version of Celluloid Junkie’s Top Women in Cinema list, for this year only. We reached out to all our former “listees” (if you didn’t hear from us we probably couldn’t track you down!) to provide an update – listed in alphabetical order – on the last year or so of their lives, what they’ve been up to and how the pandemic has affected them. 

So a huge thank you to all who took the time to answer our questions and we hope that next year will see the return of 50 Top Women In Global Cinema in its usual format. But in the meantime, put the kettle on, get comfy and read on.