Maren Ade is just one of three female directors in the competition section of the Cannes Film Festival this year, and like many of us, she’s demanding more.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Ade said, “There are not enough women directing films. In Germany, we have this discussion now about a quota system as well, and I think we should try it, because concerning the public money, it should be equal.”
THR brought up the Swedish Film Institute’s Fifty/Fifty by 2020 initiative, in which half of all films subsidized in Europe must be directed by women, and asked Ade if a similar system should exist in her native Germany.
“If someone told me in film school that it might be necessary to have a quota system, I would have thought he is crazy as there were almost half women, half men in the production as well as in the directing class,” she said. “But I think it should be tried out and checked again after 10 years. And still I think the system has to be oriented on the actual amount of women handing in projects.”
Ade is at Cannes screening “Toni Erdmann,” which follows the story of a hippie father’s relationship with his estranged daughter. It is the first German film competing for the Palme d’Or since 2008. She won the 2005 Sundance Jury prize with “The Forest for the Trees.” Her followup film, “Everyone Else,” won the Grand Jury Silver Bear at Berlin in 2009.
