#cannes17: Still Too Few Women Directors!

@devt
#WomenInFilm & Festivals & Databases
3 min readApr 13, 2017

Cannes doesn’t change! Just three films by women out of the 18 films in competition when Cannes opens on 17 May. (The record, in 2011, is four.) Here they are.

Joaquin Phoenix and Lynne Ramsay, (photo): The Playlist

Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, about a damaged war veteran, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who rescues women involved in sex trafficking.

Naomi Kawase’s Hikari (Radiance).

Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled.

And Visages, Villages, co-directed by Agnès Varda and JR has been selected Out of Competition.

It’s a little better in Un Certain Regard, five out of sixteen–

La Novia del Desierto, the debut of Cecilia Atan and Valeria Pivato, two Argentinian women.

Aala Kaf Ifrit (La Belle et la Meute), by the Tunisian Kaouther Ben Hania.

Western, by Valeska Grisebach (produced by Maren Ade).

Jeune Femme, first film by Léonor Séraille from France.

Après la Guerre by Annarita Zambrano from Italy.

AND there are three women-directed Special Screenings

Vanessa Redgrave’s doco about refugees, Sea Sorrow, will have a special screening.

It’s the first film Vanessa Redgrave has directed and is ‘a meditative reflection on the current refugee-migrant crisis mixing past and present, documentary and drama, framed within the ongoing struggle for human rights’.

They, directed by Anahita Ghazvinizadeh, whose Needle premiered in the Cannes Cinéfondation selection and won the Premier Prix, a few years back, will have a special screening too. All I can find about They is here, about its development as a Not-Coming-of-Age drama about J who has been diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder, accompanied by this gorgeous drawing.

Finally, An Inconvenient Sequel, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, will also have a special screening.

And then there are the 70th Anniversary events

Jane Campion’s and Ariel Kleiman’s Top of the Lake: China Girl is one of these events.

And Kirsten Stewart’s first short film, Come Swim, will also screen as an anniversary event.

NB! According to Women & Hollywood, as has happened before, women directors are comparatively well-represented in the Cannes short film selection — women direct 33% of shorts selected in competition this year and 44% of Cinéfondation films by film school students.

16 May

And here’s W&H’s infographic, so useful!

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@devt
#WomenInFilm & Festivals & Databases

Stories by & about women artists, writers and filmmakers. Global outlook, from Aotearoa New Zealand.