On Friday morning, people across the world watched as one of the kings of the Cannes Film Festival, Harvey Weinstein, turned himself into police and was arraigned on charges of rape and a criminal sex act. He agreed to pay $1 million in bail, wear an ankle monitor, and surrender his passport. The man who used the Cannes Film Festival — among other industry hotspots — as his sexual predatory stomping ground, is now confined to traveling between his homes in New York City and Connecticut. The women whom he allegedly assaulted and harassed never thought this day would happen — that the former titan would be doing his perp walk with the world watching.
Only six days before, at the closing awards ceremony of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, where over the previous 10 days, the largest topic of conversation was the treatment of women on, off, and behind the scenes, Asia Argento, who has alleged that Weinstein raped her at the festival, took the stage. “This festival was his hunting ground,” she said of Weinstein. That moment shook the ceremony and reverberated across the world. The ceremony ended with the jury, led by actress Cate Blanchett, giving awards to two of the three female-directed films in competition: third place, or the Jury Prize, to Nadine Labaki for her film “Capernaum,” and best screenplay to Alice Rohrwacher for “Happy as Lazzaro.” For a festival that has had such difficulty finding female-directed films to include in the main competition, honoring two of those films with prizes just proves that women can, and should, compete at the top of the industry alongside men. Yet, at the end of the night, another Cannes ended, and Jane Campion remains the only woman director to have won the Palme d’Or. She took home the prize for “The Piano,” which coincidentally is being re-released in a 25th anniversary celebration this month.
In the years that Women and Hollywood has been tracking the festival, the female-directed films in the main competition has hovered at 10 percent, and in two of those years there have actually been no women included. According to the new French collective 5050×2020, since Cannes launched, just five percent of competition films have been directed by women.
Cannes is one of the highest profile events on the film festival circuit, and it’s also one of most photographed events of the year. The lack of opportunities to compete at the highest levels of the business combined with its high visibility has turned directors into activists, and has made Cannes ground zero for the worldwide movement on the road towards gender equality.
Having just attended my fourth festival, this year I couldn’t help but notice that events focused on gender were everywhere. Whereas a couple of years ago, talking about this subject was a side conversation, this year it infiltrated every aspect of the festival including the establishment of a hotline, which unsurprisingly was busy.
The biggest and most visible event was what I have dubbed the March of 82, where 82 women in the industry climbed the steps of the Palais prior to the world premiere of Eva Husson’s film “Girls of the Sun.” The 82 women symbolized the women directors who have screened in competition — compared with 1,688 men — in 71 years of the festival. As Blanchett and Agnès Varda stated, “Women are NOT a minority in the world, yet the current state of our industry says otherwise.” I was lucky to be a part of that group and its historic moment (which was surreal), but as the memory fades, we must remember that it was only symbolic.
Cannes trades in symbolism and looking pretty on the outside. Fundamentally it is a place and a culture that is not interested in women’s stories and women’s experiences, and that is up and down the food chain — from the movies for sale in the market to how the mostly male critics review female-led films. There are events that focus on women, like the Kering talks, that for a few years allowed the Festival to say it was supporting women, but in reality, were more about celebrity headlines and less about change. The time has come to move beyond symbolism into action.
I moderated a panel — #MeToo, What’s Next? — sponsored by the Swedish Film Institute in conjunction with the festival. Several Ministers of Culture from across Europe attended, and the Swedish Culture Minister and the French Culture Minister both spoke. The leaders all took powerful stands on how significant change can be made. Cameron Bailey, the Artistic Director and Co-Head of the Toronto International Film Festival, was blunt: “If you are in a position of power where you can hire women, do that! It’s that simple.” Anna Serner, CEO of the Swedish Film Institute, who has been at the forefront of pushing this issue across the globe, made clear that festivals should prohibit directors accused of sexual harassment from participating.
Thierry Fremaux, the general delegate who runs the festival like his own private fiefdom, has spent years stubbornly dismissing this issue until his festival was directly implicated. But the institutional sexism at Cannes is bigger than Weinstein. This festival is the place where oligarchs and other rich men moor their yachts and expect young starlets to board helicopters to entertain them. It is a place where young women spend thousands of dollars to attend the festival to make contacts and are looked up and down like pieces of meat and are dismissed when they are not interested in playing the game.
Fremaux is smart: he not only sanctioned and supported the March of 82, but he, along with the heads of Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week, signed the 5050×2020 Charter for Parity and Inclusion in Cinema, Audiovisual, and Animation Festivals, where he committed to track the gender statistics of submissions, reveal the members of the selection committee, and work to reach parity on the executive board. If he follows through and shows transparency of how the movies get picked, we will finally get answers to long-standing questions about why there are so few women included. Then once and for all we can retire the argument used that women don’t make films of “quality,” which is lazy, sexist commentary that has plagued female directors for far too long.
In a hopeful sign of things to come, the film that caused the biggest stir at the festival was not even in the festival: female-led spy thriller “355,” which is based on an idea by Jessica Chastain. She’ll star alongside Lupita Nyong’o, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, and Fan Bingbing. Also encouraging is the fact that there are multiple new groups of women in countries across the globe pushing for equal funding and access to opportunities, and a variety of film boards have committed to gender parity in funding.
Whether they like it or not, the Cannes Film Festival is a global leader in the film industry. It is a place that people look to as a bellwether and a leader. For too long, this festival has modeled behavior that has allowed women to be dismissed and treated as second-class citizens in this industry. Maybe this will finally be the year that we will see things change.
