Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival 2016 gets underway today. Its Artistic Director had some thoughts to share on the dearth of women filmmakers — and lack of diversity in general — in festival programming, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

“I think we need diversity to understand the world we are living in,” said Carlo Chatrian, who is responsible for one of the most female-friendly competition line-ups we’ve seen at a major festival. He elaborated, “female directors, female scriptwriters, female producers bring this diversity. It’s not the only issue, but for sure it’s a kind of enrichment that cinema has to go into.”

This year, eight of the 17 films in competition for Locarno’s coveted Golden Leopard are female-directed or co-directed, making for a 30 percent increase from last year. Chatrian is confident that other major European festivals will soon be approaching 50/50 representation in their competition line-ups. “I think that cinema is changing and think that also, little by little, Venice, Cannes or Berlin will go in this direction,” he said.

Chatrian readily admitted, however, that such festivals are still stubbornly beholden to “the big masters,” whereas the Swiss festival is very much about up-and-coming directors. “I have more freedom in composing the program,” the Artistic Director pointed out.

Asked if he thought things were changing globally for female filmmakers, he replied, “It’s very complicated. It would be a very long answer because there are countries like Japan where the situation is not good at all for women. But what makes me happy is we have a director from Thailand, a female director from Switzerland, a female director from Bulgaria, so it’s not only France or Germany or the U.S. or the countries in which cinema is more established.”

The Locarno Film Festival runs August 3–13.