Five points for one scene: the Bechdel test in the Film Production Incentive

Since 1 July 2026 the Bechdel test earns five points in the Netherlands Film Production Incentive. You claim them with a single scene, and that scene has to survive to the final cut. If it doesn't, the Film Fund can reduce the grant.

The Bechdel test for Dutch films raised questions for this writer. Suddenly the Bechdel test turned up in a news item on the Netherlands Film Fund’s website. No explanation of what the test is or how the Film Fund intends to apply it. So I went digging.

That explanation does exist, it turns out. It just isn’t in the news item but in the regulations. Anyone who reads them will see that for producers this is more than a gesture towards equality. It is about five points you claim in your application and have to deliver right through to the final cut.

What the Film Fund’s Bechdel test actually requires

First, the basics. An application for a financial contribution under what is known as the Netherlands Film Production Incentive is assessed and ranked partly on the basis of a points system. But since 1 July this year, Dutch film and TV producers can earn 5 points under the scheme if their project passes the Bechdel test. (Incidentally, the European film funding programme Eurimages has been applying the test to the scripts submitted to it since 2014, to gather data on gender equality.)

The Bechdel test has three cumulative rules: (1) the film must feature two women (an additional requirement can be that those women also have names; the Film Fund imposes that requirement!), (2) those two women must talk to each other and (3) the conversation must be about something other than a man.

The Film Fund has set out its version of the test in annex 2 to the Reglement Stimuleringsmaatregel Filmproductie in Nederland, the regulations governing the Incentive. In your application you state in which scene, and on which page of the script, the test is passed. That scene has to stay in the film when it is made.

The points diversity earns in the Film Production Incentive

The Incentive is a grant from the Film Fund in the form of a cash rebate of up to 35% of the qualifying production costs you spend in the Netherlands. An application needs at least 75 points. If producers in a round apply for more money than is available, the ranking on points decides. Where scores are tied, the impact category carries the most weight. That is where the Bechdel test sits.

Within that category, 10 points go to diversity and gender equality. You get five of them if the majority of the core creative team (producer, screenwriter and director) identify as women. The other five are for the Bechdel test. Until 1 July those five points went to a lead cast that realistically reflects society. So the Fund now looks at the script rather than the cast.

The test applies to feature films, feature-length animated films, drama series and animated series. Documentaries and documentary series are excluded. There the core creative team earns the full 10 points. The new points system applies to applications from 1 July 2026: for films from the round of 24 August and for series from 26 October.

Cutting a scene can cost you your Incentive grant

This is where it becomes a legal matter. Under article 13 of the regulations you have to make the film in line with the points system you completed in your application. If the film departs from it, the Fund can reduce or withdraw the grant under article 20. The Film Fund itself adds that the number of points in the award decision cannot be lowered when the grant is finally settled.

A scene goes missing faster than you’d think. A round of rewrites. A director with final cut who wants a tighter film. In a minority co-production, the script and the final edit may rest with the foreign lead producer, while the Dutch applicant carries the risk on the grant.

Anyone claiming the points should therefore also secure them in the contracts. That starts with the screenwriter’s agreement and the director’s agreement. In a co-production it belongs in the co-production agreement too. Agree which scene it is and that it stays in. And settle who bears the loss if the grant still turns out lower.

Where the Bechdel test falls short as a funding criterion

Would a film set largely in a brothel, in which the women regularly talk about their clients, pass if there is one scene in which two of the women discuss where and when they’ll get their nails done?

The idea behind the test is a good one, of course. The aim is to get an indication of (the number, content and quality of) the female roles in the film in question. That this test is still needed in 2026 is not good, however. The test draws attention to gender inequality in fiction (and perhaps not only in fiction), which sadly is still a live problem.

I looked up a few figures. They don’t make for cheerful reading. In 2014 the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media counted the named characters in 120 films from 2010 to 2013. Fewer than a third of them were women. In 2016 Polygraph ran the numbers on the scripts of more than two thousand successful films, looking at who does the most talking. In only 22% of those films was it a woman.

Sadder still, to my mind, is a BBC analysis from 2018. Of the 89 films that had won the Oscar for Best Picture, more than half failed the Bechdel test. In the 1930s the winners did better than in 2018!

The writer Charles Stross observed that of the films that pass the Bechdel test, half only pass because the women talk about marriage and babies instead of men.

It turns out that films about important women, about women in general or aimed at women also often fail the Bechdel test. In the television series Sex and the City one of the main characters wonders: “How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends?”

The regulations do describe the criteria for the test, but only briefly. What counts as a conversation? Does a scene fail if a man is mentioned in passing? And the applicant states the points, after which the Fund checks whether the substantiation holds up. For a ranking in which five points can be decisive, that is thin.

A mirror of society as a yardstick for film funding

Our films are a representation of society (in a new co-production by The Film Kitchen, Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek even says: “If aliens were to visit our earth and by chance ask me, ‘could you explain to us what humanity is about?’ I would not tell them go around and look. I would tell them, look at these and these and these movies, and you will understand us.”)

And of course films are a means of changing society. But is this Bechdel test really the right test for assessing funding applications? All the more so now that the Film Fund has described the criteria for the test, and the way it will be applied, only briefly. And the risk lies with the producer.

Applying for the Incentive and want to know how to secure the Bechdel points in your contracts? Call 020 675 88 21 or send us a message using the form below.