As I was walking along The Croisette in Cannes last night, headed to a party hosted by the IFP and Calvin Klein, it suddenly struck me that I’d watched three festival competition entries over the course of two days and all of them were directed by women.
There are four films by women in the Cannes Competition this year and the festival scheduled three of them back to back to back to open this year’s festival. In recent days, we’ve had a chance to see not only the controversial Sleeping Beauty by Julia Leigh, Lynne Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin and Maiwenn’s Poliss.
“After decades of having primarily male directors in the competition, I find it astounding that in a two day period there are three films by women,” Annette Insdorf said last night, “But having seen all three, there’s no way to generalize.”
Appropriately, last night’s bash in Cannes was in celebration of women in film. I ran into scholar, writer and Cannes press conference moderator Insdorf the moment I arrived at the fete and we immediately retreated to a quieter spot to talk for a few minutes about the early days of this year’s festival.
“It’s no longer going to be possible to segregate women directors,” Insdorf explained as we discussed the pronounced presence of women filmmakers not only in the Cannes competition, but in the concurrent Director’s Fortnight and Critic’s Week sections here in France.
“In a few years we’re probably not even going to notice the gender difference,” Annette Insdorf concluded.
The full conversation is available in the latest FilmLinc podcast from Cannes.
FilmLinc: Women at Cannes by FilmLinc
Eugene Hernandez is the Director of Digital Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and a founder of indieWIRE. Follow him on Twitter from Cannes (@eug) and follow the rest of FIlmLinc.com’s Cannes coverage in our special section.
