Virginie Devesa, the co-head of the Paris-based sales agency Alpha Violet, is at the Locarno Film Festival this week in search of new filmmaking voices and has her eye out for films made by women. The agency, Variety writes in a new interview, has been her mission and her passion, and it has a special interest in female voices.

“We are primarily dedicated to first features,” Devesa said. “We like to discover new talents and their raw material with a preference for female filmmakers. Around 35 percent of Alpha Violet’s catalog of now 30 features are made by women. Moreover, we seek to discover new territories and continents. Our last movie, ‘Wolf and Sheep,’ is a good example. It’s a first feature film from Afghanistan made by the female director Shahrbanoo Sadat. It fuses fantasy and contemporary Afghan reality with originality and won the Art Cinema Award at Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes.”

Alpha Violet was founded by Devesa and her co-founder, Keiko Funato of Japan. They later brought on Jean-Baptiste Bailly-Maitre. Together, they carefully hand-pick their films by asking: “Does this material need us?” Some of the films in the catalog include Julie Kowalski’s “Raging Rose,” Maria Speth’s “Daughters,” and Natalya Kydryashova’s “Pioneer Heroes.”

“We have two directions: Female filmmaking, which is always our priority, and Eastern Europe,” Devesa specified. “I always dreamt of representing a Ukrainian film. Like Romanian or Bulgarian cinema that today are building, we aspire to shed a light on Ukrainian cinema.”

To read the entire interview with Devesa, head over to Variety.