“Suffragette,” which opened last Friday at the Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema, is a rarity in Hollywood. Not only did it retain its director, screenwriter and producers from the earliest stages of pre-production through its completion, but all four are women. In a thoroughly white and male industry, this qualifies as a surprise, though director Sarah Gavron hopes that will change.

“I’m very, very for promoting diversity behind the camera,” she said at a press conference with college journalists in October. “Not just sexual diversity, not just women and men, which is key, because…over 90 percent of films each year are directed by men, but also mainly directed by white, straight, educated men. And we have to change that. We have to get people of all parts of society telling stories, because that reflects the culture we live in.”

The film depicts the early stages of the feminist movement in England, particularly the fight for female voting rights by the Women’s Social and Political Union. At the center of the film is Maud Watts (played by Carey Mulligan), a laundry worker moved to action by her increasing frustration with the mistreatment of her and her coworkers in public and private spaces.

Though Gavron, screenwriter Abi Morgan and producers Alison Owen and Faye Ward pursued other projects during the 10 years it spent in planning and production, they were able to see “Suffragette” through due to their persistence and chemistry. The four previously worked on the 2007 film “Brick Lane,” allowing them to establish a rapport that paid dividends when making “Suffragette.”

“I think all having done a film before was important,” Owen said. “We had a certain dynamic and a certain shorthand—we knew we all got on, and so that made it much easier to embark on a project that we knew was going to be difficult from when we started it. We knew it would be hard to raise the money to make the film that we wanted to make, but we knew we were on a journey, and we knew our fellow travelers.”

Morgan, who continued to revise the script through shooting, drew motivation from the lack of female voices she encountered while studying English and Drama at Exeter University.

“One of the things I do remember very clearly is the start of my engagement with feminism, which related to the suffragette movement, because I started to look at the plays that we were working on and they seemed to be all by men,” she said. “I think it made me start to hunger to hear women’s voices, and that made me go back and look at some great, female historical characters, and it was around that time I became more aware of Emmeline Pankhurst [played by Meryl Streep in the film] and the work that they’d done in the suffragette movement.”

Beyond the desire to honor an overlooked chapter of social history, the four found thematic parallels that made the film particularly relevant. Given the increasing prominence of racial tensions and gender and wage inequality in American cultural discourse, there was more than enough room for a film about an historical triumph over social oppression.

“I think that by looking at something very, very specific and particular, you can draw universal truths,” Gavron said. “I mean, there were two reasons to tell this story. One was to remember how hard fought for the vote was and how far we’ve come since it and the debt we owe to these women who started to change the course of history…The other thing was that it chimed with all sorts of issues today, so I think it’s quite useful as a way of connecting through the specific details of the past.”

Part of that connection involved the film’s aesthetic, which clashes with historical drama conventions. Where many period pieces opt for polished visual styles that reflect idealized versions of the past more than reality, Gavron sought a rougher and more immediate style, shooting on lightweight Super 16 cameras to encourage authentic performances from her actors.

“There was something quite exciting about shooting on Super 16 that made it feel very real,” she said. “And then the handheld camera allowed the actors quite a bit of freedom, so we weren’t staging and hitting marks, they were allowed to move quite freely so that you could get a captured performance rather than a staged performance.”

These details have been upstaged by a recent mini-scandal over t-shirts worn by Streep and Mulligan. The shirts, which read, “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave,” (a quote taken from Pankhurst) incited controversy in the American press. Though the filmmakers understand the sensitive nature of the shirts’ language, they hope it won’t distract from the film’s message.

“It’s really a matter of historical perspective, rather than anything else,” Owen said. “Those words were said in a very particular time. They are understood in a very different way in England, and I think that we welcome the discourse on the subject. It’s an important discourse to have, but it would be a terrible shame if it skewed the narrative from what we’re trying to do, which is raise everybody’s consciousness and awareness for all women.”

If the film is able to strike a chord with audiences and Oscar voters, that controversy will soon become a distant memory.