LA Mostra del Cinema, the most venerable of international film festivals which opened on Wednesday in Venice, and its new head, Alberto Barbera, seem to have got the message. What message? The one sent by dismayed festival-goers to Cannes last May upon discovering that out of 22 films in competition, none had been directed by a woman.
There was no need to be a hardcore feminist to feel a little troubled, especially when the newly elected French president François Hollande announced a perfectly gender balanced government on the very day the Cannes film festival opened: 17 female ministers and 17 male ministers.
One doesn’t necessarily have to agree with French feminist groupuscules such as La Barbe, but had it not been for their public brouhaha about Cannes’ lack of female presence in the competition, it is most probable that Barbera wouldn’t have taken any notice.
Yet, he has — and I am pleased to see there are 20 female directors showing their films at the Mostra these coming days, and that four of them have been selected in the main competition out of 17 films.
Only four films directed by women out of 17? A scandal, will surely shout back some of my feminist colleagues. Probably, but it’s better than none, and we’ll be watching next year as the figure must increase.
For the figure not only must, but can increase. Until recently, it was indeed easy for festival directors to argue that there were very few female movie directors, and therefore much fewer films of theirs to choose from. It is no longer the case, and it’s high time the news reached all film festivals.
In the past 15 years, the tide has indeed turned and there are in many countries new generations of female directors who don’t shy away from the camera. They are in their 20s and 30s, the true heirs of pioneers such as the world’s first ever film-maker, Alice Guy, in 1896 or, closer to us, the formidable 84-year-old Agnes Varda. Fabio Ferzetti, the chief film critic of the Italian daily Il Messaggero, says:
“There are likely to be more and more films by female directors in main competition in the A-list festivals, simply because films directed by the new generation of women tend, in my opinion, to be particularly beautifully crafted, original and sensual. I’m thinking, from the top of my head, of films such as Water Lilies and Tomboy by 32-year-old French Celine Sciamma, and XXY by 36-year-old Argentinian Lucia Puenzo. Those films treat the human body in an entirely different and perhaps novel way from male directors, and this is a fascinating thing to discover for both film critics and the public who are not used to this.”
And if a female director wins Venice’s Golden Lion next week, like Sofia Coppola did in 2010, let us hope there won’t be furious allegations that she won simply because she is the daughter of a famous male director (Francis Ford Coppola) and the ex-girlfriend of the head of the jury (Quentin Tarantino). — The Guardian, London
