For France’s premiere film and television trade industry publication, it wasn’t a good look.
The cover photo of the Sept. 30 issue of Le Film Français, a must-read for Gallic filmmakers, featured seven men — Pathé President Jérome Seydoux, surrounded by actors Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney, François Civil and Pio Marmaï, and actor-directors Guillaume Canet and Danny Boon —under the headline “Objective: Reconquest.”
The backlash was immediate.
“No women, no diversity. Classy!” tweeted French actress Alexandra Lamy (You Choose!). Audrey Diwan, director of Venice Film Festival winner Happening, added ironically, “If we’re bothering you guys, just let us know.”
The magazine quickly apologized, but for many, the incident was illustrative of how far the French industry still has to go.
“The Film Français cover was a stark reminder to me that inequality in the industry is deep-seated and significant progress still needs to be made,” noted Anne Marsh, CEO of French film giant StudioCanal.
Tweets aside, female filmmakers in France are letting their movies talk for them. These days, the most exciting, innovative cinema emerging from la république is by women. Take Julia Ducournau, who has given auteur cinema a one-two punch with Raw (2016) — a cannibal horror movie that explores issues of femininity, sexual awakening and sisterly bonding — and Titane, the 2021 Palme d’Or winner, an indescribable combination of serial killer, body horror and sci-fi that packs in so many themes, on female sexualization, gender identity and parent-child conflict, that it leaves one’s head spinning. Or the prolific Mia Hansen-Løve, whose deeply personal, often semi-autobiographical features — Father of My Children(2009), Bergman Island (2021) and Things to Come (2022) — find deep emotion and drama while remaining entirely authentic.
Or Alice Diop, whose films — the documentaries La mort de Danton (2011), La permanence (2016) and We (2021); and her narrative debut, Saint Omer (2022) — explore French society’s deep structural inequalities and the Black immigrant experience with a combination of emotional empathy and intellectual rigor.
Saint Omer, which won the Grand Jury prize and the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for best debut feature in Venice, is France’s official international feature entry for the 2022 Oscars. It won out over a five-film shortlist that included Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning and two other female-directed movies (Alice Winocour’s Paris Memories and The Worst Ones by Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret). The token male contender was Éric Gravel with his Venice Horizons winner Full Time. “Having four out of five films on the Oscar shortlist directed by women shows how much has changed,” says UniFrance executive director Daniela Elstner.
Elstner attributes the change to the #MeToo reckoning. The revelations of sexual harassment within the film industry also highlighted gender inequality as one of the underlying causes of abuse. Movements like Europe’s 5050 by 2020 campaign, which was launched at the Cannes festival in 2016, a year before #MeToo, but truly gained momentum in its wake, pushed European institutions, including film festivals and public subsidy bodies, to make gender equality a part of their selection criteria. As a result, says Elstner, “women are making films and more female directors are getting to make their second, third or fourth film than they did in the past.”
And, just as important for their careers, these women’s films are selling.
Neon’s boutique distribution label Super snatched up U.S. rights to Saint Omer from Wild Bunch International shortly after the film’s Venice debut. Sony Pictures Classics acquired One Fine Morning for the U.S. from sales outfit Les Films du Losange, and art house streamer Mubi picked Léa Mysius’ The Five Devils from Wild Bunch for multiple territories, including the U.S. and U.K. All three films will screen at AFI Fest in Los Angeles this week.
“It is obvious that there’s been a change, a real turning point in the French industry,” says The Five Devils producer Fanny Yvonnet. “There are now more young female directors who are starting to get real recognition and visibility and can move forward with their careers. That didn’t happen in the past.”
French director Rebecca Zlotowski says the recognition that female directors and female-focused stories have value has begun to influence the sort of stories being made. Her new feature, Other People’s Children, which explores the experience of a woman who forms a deep bond with her boyfriend’s young daughter, was originally planned as a story of male impotence. But in the process of development, she shifted focus and made the movie about a side character, the 40-something “other woman,” played by Virginie Efira.
“In the beginning, I needed a masculine subject, to approach it,” says Zlotowski. “The process of developing the film was a political liberation for me. It’s my fifth feature, but it’s the first time I’ve allowed myself to embrace a very feminine topic.”
This “liberation” seems to be catching. There is a wave of young French female talents, among them Lola Quivoron (Rodeo), Cristèle Alves Meira (Alma Viva), Emilie Frèche (Les engagés) and Noémie Lvovsky (Camille Rewinds), emerging with the confidence to tell the stories that engage them, without concern for the patriarchal obsessions of the past.
At the same time, trailblazers like Claire Denis seem at the peak of their powers. Denis’ Both Sides of the Blade, starring Juliette Binoche, won the prize for best director at the Berlin Film Festival in February. Her English-language Stars at Noon, with Margaret Qualley, took the Grand Jury prize in Cannes. In a feat of exquisite timing, on Nov. 3 the Academy Museum will launch a new exhibition honoring transformative French director Agnès Varda, arguably the most influential female filmmaker of her generation.
But, as that Le Film Français cover demonstrates, there is still work to be done. A report published Oct. 11 by the European Audiovisual Observatory found that only 25 percent of films made in Europe between 2017 and 2021 were directed by women and that female directors, on average, work on fewer films than their male counterparts.
“Twenty-five percent to 75 percent isn’t a reason to cheer and say ‘we’ve done it!’ ” says Five Devilsdirector Mysius. “This is just the beginning. The fight has to continue. We’re not done yet.”
This story first appeared in The Hollywood Reporter’s Nov. 2 daily issue at the American Film Market.
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Inside #MeToo’s Lasting Impact in France - Hollywood Reporter
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