No Movies By Women Will Compete at the Cannes Film Festival

Via Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood, this is profoundly depressing:

But this year we are back to two years ago when no women were included. NO WOMEN DIRECTED FILMS WILL BE IN THE MAIN COMPETITION AT CANNES. That is ZERO out of 21. Two women directed films out of 17 films — Trois Mondes (dir. Catherine Corsini) and Confession of a Child of the Century (dir. Sylvie Verheyde) — are in Un Certain Regard.

Cannes is the most prestigious world competition and to have no female directors is just a slap in the face. I cannot believe there were no films worthy of inclusion. I just don’t believe it. The whole process is fucked up that women can’t even get into the conversations about films that people are even thinking about will be included in lineups. For an industry that professes to examine questions about life, that challenges conventions, that pushes the envelope, the total neanderthal approach to women is breathtaking. How can this industry say it is progressive or forward thinking in any way when it constantly shunts aside the perspectives of half of the world.

The outlook is somewhat better for non-white directors, who directed five of the 21 films in competition. Lee Daniels, Sangsoo Hong, Sangsoo Im, Abbas Kiarostami, and Yousry Nasrallah will all be in the mix. She’d like to see a quota for movies directed by women. I’m not sure I’m ready to go there, both because such a quota is an incomplete way to address much broader-based discrimination in the industry, and because I worry that movies directed by women who got into the pool would then be viewed with suspicion, whether they needed the quota to get in or no. I’d hate to think that a move to make sure more women got considered ended up making it harder for women to win.