THINK film festivals and you probably think posh frocks, paparazzi and Hollywood A-listers sashaying up red carpets to the premieres of the big American movies soon to be vying for Academy Awards.

It’s particularly true of September’s crop of major film festivals – Venice, Toronto and New York. The first ended last Saturday, the second runs until Sunday and the third opens on September 28. When the popcorn settles (if anything as vulgar as popcorn is allowed) these three will have given premieres to First Man, the Neil Armstrong biopic starring Ryan Gosling; new Coen Brothers film The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs; Yorgos Lanthimos’s English-language historical romp The Favourite (starring Olivia Colman, who also won the Best Actress award at Venice); a remake of A Star Is Born featuring Lady Gaga (and shot partly at Glastonbury); and Roma, the latest from Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón.

That’s not to say there aren’t serious issues being addressed or political debates being had, though in the case of Venice that has more to do with who wasn’t at the festival than who was. Just one of the 21 films in its main section was directed by a woman and it’s four decades since the top award went to a female director.

But look closer to home this month and you’ll find two examples of film festivals which, though considerably less starry and glamorous, demonstrate both a genuine diversity of subject matter and a directorial gender balance which, for once, is in favour of the distaff side. More than that they champion real human stories, have a genuine commitment to engaging with and nurturing audiences, and demonstrate the increasing power of the documentary form as a means of starting important conversations and debating those already in the public domain. They are the three-day Glasgow Youth Film Festival (GYFF), celebrating its 10th year and opening tonight, and Take One Action! (TOA), founded in 2008 and running across venues in Glasgow and Edinburgh until September 23. This year the festivals are also collaborating to present a special screening of Young Solitude, a fly-on-the-wall documentary about teenagers in Paris.

“We established ourselves as a festival which champions people power, for want of a better phrase,” explains Tamara Van Strijthem, TOA’s Executive Director. “We focus on social and environmental justice and the role of social movements in ensuring that these ideals are realised in the world around us. I guess what for me sets us apart, and which I’ve really valued over the years of working at Take One Action!, has been the fact that as well as encouraging debate and discussion in cinema at the time when we have direct interaction with audiences, we’ve been putting a lot of energy into nurturing people’s sense of empowerment beyond the screen.”

In recent years that has involved projects such as setting up a directory of films which can be streamed online for free. This directory now contains over 400 works, both shorts and features. From the data acquired so far, the audience for that service is mostly Scottish and mostly young. And in contrast to the lack of female directors at the Venice film festival, TOA’s proud claim is that 60% of the films in its 2018 programme are either directed or co-directed by women. It’s a stark difference. What lies behind it?

“There’s lots of different reasons at play,” says Van Strijthem. “We screen documentaries primarily and there’s a much better representation of female directors in that sector. I think the traditional understanding of what a director should be like and look like is maybe less restrictive in the documentary world. And it may be that for a long time the value of having a female director has been recognised in documentary film-making.”

Across a wide-ranging programme TOA offers mono-titled films with single subjects at their hearts – for example Silvana, about uncompromising Swedish rapper Silvana Imam, or Silas, about Liberian activist and anti-corruption campaigner Silas Siakor – and others which take a more multi-faceted approach to issues of gender, race, equality, environmentalism and politics. Standouts in the programme include Golden Dawn Girls, a look at the women involved with Greece’s notorious far right party; Cloud Forest, about an area of Mexico facing environmental catastrophe; The Lonely Battle Of Thomas Reid, about a reclusive Irish farmer fighting a multinational (think You’ve Been Trumped set in County Kildare); and Time For Ilhan, which follows refugee Ilhan Omar in her bid to become the first person of Somali descent elected to America’s House of Representatives.

Some films are intimate. Some are powerful. Many, such as A Better Man, are both. It receives its UK premiere at TOA and its co-director, Attiya Khan, is also its subject.

“A Better Man looks at the issue of gender-based violence but takes a very different approach insofar as the protagonist is a survivor of domestic abuse and she invited the man who abused her as a teenager to come and speak to her on camera about the choices they made at the time and how they’ve affected her throughout her life,” says Van Strijthem. For her the film underlines “the importance of including men in conversations we have about gender-based violence and giving men who have done horrendous things time to reflect on them, and the person that they hurt the decency and respect that that acknowledgement brings.”

Not everything in the festivals is documentary-based or so issue-laden. Far from it. GYFF opens tonight with Scottish-made zombie musical Anna And The Apocalypse and among the other highlights is a screening of Skate Kitchen by award-winning American film-maker Crystal Moselle. It stars Rachelle Vinberg and Jaden Smith (son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith) in a coming-of-age story about a multi-racial all-female skateboarding crew in Long Island, New York – the real-life Skate Kitchen team which gives the film its title.

It's school-age children aged 15 and up, as well as recent school leavers and students, who are the target audience for Sarah Emery, Festival Co-ordinator with GYFF. The festival was originally part of the larger Glasgow Film Festival but two years ago the decision was made to move it to its own slot in September. The idea, says Emery, was “to give young people a platform that stood out from the main film festival”.

“It’s important to get young audiences, particularly this age group that we’re looking at – we’ve got 13 young programmers this year between the ages of 15 and 19. That’s the kind of age that we’d love to keep coming to the cinema and to festivals. But rather than us telling them what to see, we’re getting them to pick films for their peers.”

Increasingly, she says, young cinema audiences want an extra experience beyond just seeing a film. It’s a demand that events such as film festivals are well placed to serve by offering question and answer sessions with directors (Crystal Moselle and some of her cast members will be at the screening of Skate Kitchen) or, as in the case of the “pop-up” screening of School Of Rock at Blythswood Hall which closes GYFF, a Battle of the Bands competition to warm things up.

For Van Strijthem, meanwhile, the job of festivals such as TOA and GYFF is to build communities of film-goers beyond the duration of the festival itself but also to feed “the desire to watch things communally and to reflect on things together”. So on the subject of diversity, she’s clear that the need for it extends to film festivals themselves as much as it does to actors, directors and stories.

“It’s paramount,” she says. “If you were to lose that [diversity] the cultural landscape would be much impoverished – if all you had were those generic festivals that, yes, do provide you with fantastic opportunities to watch films you might not get to see otherwise, but whose approach is going to be quite streamlined.”

For next year’s Oscar winners, visit Venice, Toronto and New York. For almost every other subject under the sun, stay at home this month.

The Glasgow Youth Film Festival opens tonight and runs until Sunday; Take One Action! runs until September 23 in Glasgow and Edinburgh, from November 16-18 in Aberdeen and November 23-25 in Inverness.