Women held 17% of key behind-camera roles when the Celluloid Ceiling study began tracking the figure in 1998.
Last year, that number stood at 23%. Six points in 27 years. That statistic opened a panel at the Lumière Summit on Monday titled “Safer Sets, Different Stories: Why Gender Balance Matters,” where leaders from StudioCanal, Canal+, the BFI, the Berlinale and the Toronto Film Festival called for structural accountability measures and argued that the failure to include women is as much a creative loss as a moral one.
“The cinema industry should not be considering this as a constraint or a concession,” said Anna Marsh, chief executive of Studiocanal and deputy chief executive of Canal+. “It should be about cinema investing in its own future.” Fifty percent of film school graduates are women, Marsh noted, but by the time filmmakers reach their third feature, only one in six directors is a woman. A woman director’s budget runs, on average, at 44% of that assigned to a male director. Canal+ has extended its development budget by €1 million over three years specifically to finance projects from female writers and directors, Marsh said, and a film about silent cinema pioneer Alice Guy, to be directed by Anna Girardot, is in development.
