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Angels Wear White is set in a seaside town where two schoolgirls are raped by a powerful older man.

In the course of his rich career, the late, great Alan Rickman was often cast as a charismatic trickster or magician. In a largely forgotten 1994 film, he played Franz Mesmer, the 18th-century Viennese doctor whose practice of what we would now call hypnosis and theories about an invisible force running through the human body were reduced to the Victorian amusement named mesmerism. You can easily find images from the poster for Mesmer online, and there is Rickman, seductive as always, front and centre.

Down in one corner, there's a much smaller image of a woman – that's Amanda Ooms, playing Maria Theresia von Paradis, a harpsichordist and composer who was probably Mesmer's most famous patient. For a brief period, he was said to have cured her blindness.

Fast forward 23 years and take a look at Licht (Light), or Mademoiselle Paradis as it has been titled in English.

Today, in a German-language film directed by Barbara Albert that was set to make its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday, it is the patient, played by Maria Dragus, who is front and centre, while Mesmer (Devid Striesow) has been reduced to a supporting role.

Is it any coincidence that Mesmer was a film written and directed by men while Mademoiselle Paradis was created by two women – its Austrian director and screenwriter Kathrin Resetarits, working from the novel by Alissa Walser?

As TIFF launches various initiatives to help improve the abysmally low representation of female directors in the film industry and in competition at major festivals, Mademoiselle Paradis seems a strong example of the differences gender equity might make on screen. In the story of the Mesmer-Paradis doctor-patient relationship, the spotlight shifts from the magical man to the mysterious woman.

Mademoiselle Paradis is the story of how the unhappy young prodigy, paraded through Viennese salons by her ambitious parents, finds her sight and loses it again – but most importantly finds her selfhood. Speaking from her base in Berlin before leaving for Toronto, Albert said her main interest was in following a character who begins the film as an object and becomes a subject.

But she added: "I find it dangerous to talk about the one female view of something: If I am a woman, I can only show certain images or I have to be sensitive. … Do I have a different approach from a male director? I only know my approach."

Chinese director Vivian Qu is also wary of being pigeonholed.

She found herself in the awkward position of being the only female director in the main competition at the Venice Film Festival this year – where her feature Angels Wear White premiered on Thursday before playing TIFF – and was repeatedly asked to comment on that.

"There are two sides," she said in a phone interview from Venice on the eve of the premiere. "Of course, we want to promote female films, but as a female director I don't want to be promoted as part of a quota system. It's a fine balance."

Venice has defended its selection by noting a low number of submissions by female directors – in other words, the festival believes it has a pipeline problem – but TIFF's lineup rather belies that argument.

One-third of the films in the festival this year are directed by women, and in the 12-title juried Platform competition (which includes Mademoiselle Paradis), programmers have achieved gender parity.

In July, TIFF announced a five-year plan to increase opportunities for women both on screen and behind the camera, including skills development and mentorship, and it's currently fundraising to support the "Share Her Journey" plan. Job equity in a high-profile industry is a laudable goal, but for audiences the question has to be: Will such initiatives ultimately make a difference to the kind of films we see?

Angels Wear White may provide one answer. Set in a seaside town where two schoolgirls are raped by a powerful older man, the drama centres around one of the victims and another teenage girl, a young hotel clerk who is the only witness to the crime.

TIFF has labelled the film neo-noir: It is heavy on atmosphere, exposes corruption and turns on a crime. Noir films also traditionally featured strong female characters, and one of the few sympathetic adults in Angels Wear White is a crusading female lawyer, but the passivity of the central schoolgirl and the silence of the hotel clerk turn any traditional narrative expectation on its head. The film is not a whodunit – the question is only whether the criminal will ever have to pay for his crime.

"I didn't think of it as a genre film or noir," Qu said. "It came from reality, from telling stories about young girls."

Intriguingly, this dark film is full of white light – reflecting off the polished hotel lobby, the sandy beach and the oversized statue of Marilyn Monroe, skirt lifted in Seven Year Itch pose, a giant symbol of Hollywood sexism presiding mutely over the action.

For all Qu's tact about Venice, it is hard not to perceive in Angels Wear White a powerful retort to the movies' male gaze – and the kind of stimulating film that TIFF audiences can expect more of as a better gender balance takes hold.

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