We’re in love with these “realistic female-driven” movie trailers

This week in Australia is the All About Women festival. As if we didn’t already have plenty of good reasons to travel to Sydney, this festival has bumped it to the top of our list. (The fact that Miranda July has been Instagramming her experience there all week doesn’t hurt.)

With 30 international speakers on everything from female incarceration to the female memoir, there’s a topic for everyone. But our personal favorite from the festival so far is a series of fake trailers for imagined films that pass the Bechdel test.

The film ideas were first created by Kira Garcia last November on Lenny Letter. After getting tired of generic female characters like “Anonymous, Supportive Wife in a Cashmere Turtleneck” and “Uptight Careerist Who Needs to Get Laid,” she decided to take action.

Garcia wrote an incredible imagined list of movie plots, “Realistic Female-Driven Film Treatments,” that would pass the Bechdel test with flying colors — while being wildly entertaining. The list features everything from an elderly lesbian couple who buys a haunted bed-and-breakfast, to a woman who chooses to be a prostitute, lives a satisfying life, and dies peacefully at age 70 without regrets.

One of our personal favorites is “No Thanks, Mike,” which genuinely twists the desperate career-woman cliché. Here’s the synopsis:

It’s really worth reading all the movie descriptions before you watch the trailer. You’ll end up wishing more than ever that these movies actually existed — but the trailer is a good substitute.

So until we can all actually make it to Sydney, we invite you to join us in curling up with some popcorn, this trailer, and the festival’s Twitter hashtag #allaboutwomen. After all, maybe if we tweet about it enough, these dream films can become a reality.