The slow path towards gender equality at the Cannes Film Festival

Parity is progressing but there is still a long way to go at the 76th Cannes Film Festival, with seven directors out of a total of 21 films competing for the Palme d’Or.

Seven, a record number

For the first time, the most important film festival in the world will have seven directors in its official competition, that is, a third of the total. Last year there were five.

“We are pleased by this number of female directors in competition but we are also concerned because it is evident that we are moving too slowly,” Clementine Charlemaine, a member of a French film lobby group known as 50/50, told AFP.

“Although we have not reached parity, we see that the programming of the Cannes Film Festival goes beyond the production of films made by women,” explains Fabienne Silvestre, co-founder and director of “Femmes de cinéma”, a think tank on the situation of women in European cinema.

According to statistics from the European Audiovisual Observatory, cited by that association, 21% of European films between 2017 and 2021 were shot by a woman.

Glass roof?

The Berlin Festival, which has kept detailed statistics on the issue since 2002, has not managed to exceed the figure of seven filmmakers in competition, its record.

This year there were six filmmakers, out of 19 films that competed for the Golden Bear, that is, a percentage similar to that of Cannes.

In Venice, of 23 films in contention for the Golden Lion, eight were directed by women.

But the path traveled is important. As recently as 2012, no female filmmaker was in competition at Cannes.

Heather Rabbatts, at the head of the activist organization Time’s Up UK, welcomes the changes in the French pageant, but deplores despite everything that there are not enough “black women”.

In other sections of Cannes, parity has already arrived, as in the Critics’ Week, where six directors of eleven films participate in competition.

Only two women have won the Palme d’Or: the New Zealander Jane Campion ex-aequo in 1993 with “The Piano Lesson”, and the French Julia Ducournau in 2021 with “Titane”.

Venice has awarded three Golden Lions to women, also consecutively: Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland” in 2020), Audrey Diwan (“The Event” in 2021) and Laura Poitras (“Beauty and Pain” in 2022).

The winners of the Berlinale in 2022 were even more contrasting: the award for best film went to “Alcarrás”, by the Spanish Carla Simón, but it was also women who won the award for best director and the jury prize. One man, Hong Sang-soo from Asia, received the grand jury prize.

The director himself acknowledged that he became aware of this situation at the final press conference, to questions from a journalist.

multiple causes

How to explain the lack of continuity, despite the fact that in countries like France, half of the students in the main film schools are women?

“It is difficult for women to project themselves with a long career in the cinema. And there is also the issue of money. Asking for large sums of money is difficult,” says Fabienne Silvestre.

Clémentine Charlemaine confirms that “female directors are confined to low budgets: more than three quarters have a budget of less than 4 million euros (about 4.4 million dollars)”, according to a study by the 50/50 group.

Similarly, “black growers have a hard time accessing investors,” adds Heather Rabbatts.

“The quotas still do not arouse enthusiasm, although there are two countries that have been experimenting since 2021 with a kind of hybrid quotas,” Silvestre explains.

Austria has quotas but does not apply sanctions if they are not respected, while the United Kingdom has reinforced its objectives in terms of representativeness.