As gender parity becomes increasingly commonplace in festival programming, Cannes continues to lag far behind. Long considered one of the most prestigious fests in the world, Cannes still seems to be struggling to acknowledge the existence of women-directed films, despite signing a gender parity pledge in 2018.
The festival has announced its 2021 Official Selection. Twenty-four titles will screen in Competition and vie for the fest’s most prestigious honor, the Palme d’Or, and just four of them are helmed by women. That amounts to about 17 percent of the slate, a stat that’s as disappointing as it is infuriating. While the world changes around it, Cannes remains stagnant.
Since 2005, Cannes’ Competition program has never included more than four features from women filmmakers.
Mia Hansen-Løve’s “Bergman Island” and Ildikó Enyedi’s “The Story of My Wife” are among this year’s Competition titles. The former tells the story of an American couple who visit a Swedish Island to work on screenplays for their respective upcoming films, and the latter sees a man making a bet with a friend that he’ll marry the first woman who enters the café they’re in. Also set to screen are “Titane,” Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to “Raw,” and “La Fracture,” Catherine Corsini’s tale of two women on the verge of a breakup.
Women-helmed offerings in other sections of the fest include Andrea Arnold’s “Cow,” a documentary about a pair of cows, Gessica Généus’s “Freda,” a drama about a family living in Haiti, and Valérie Lemercier’s “Aline, The Voice Of Love,” which is loosely inspired by the life of singer Celine Dion.
Last year’s fest was cancelled due to COVID-19, but Cannes decided to announce the program anyway, allowing films to append the moniker “Official Section of the 2020 Cannes Film Festival.” Initial reports claimed that a record number of films directed by women were included in the Official Selection, but Cannes got the numbers wrong.
Cannes 2021 will take place in-person July 6-17. Head over to Screen Daily to check out the complete lineup.
