In 2018, Ava DuVernay, Cate Blanchett, Agnès Varda, Kristen Stewart and over 80 other female filmmakers stood on the steps of the Palais at the Cannes Film Festival to protest gender inequality in the global film industry. That year, only three films in the festival’s prestigious competition section were directed by women.

Thierry Frémaux then signed a pledge from Le Collectif 50/50, the French association dedicated to promoting sexual and gender diversity in the film industry. The pledge outlined steps the festival would take to move toward greater inclusion of women in its lineup, including generating gendered statistics for its annual program, while working toward achieving gender equity in its governing bodies and programming committees. 

Some eight years later, while gains have been made, this year’s competition section includes five female directors, down from last year’s seven (the record for the most women directors ever in the main competition section). At the 2026 festival’s opening press conference on May 12, Cannes boss Frémaux defensively offered: “Films are chosen for their quality, not the gender of their directors.” 

When asked about its efforts to reach parity in the festival’s main competition, a spokesperson for the fest who was reached for comment by THR said: “The Cannes Film Festival has been committed to gender parity for several years across all areas directly under its responsibility.”

“The word quota is scaring everybody,” says Fanny de Casimacker, general delegate at Le Collectif 50/50. “People in the industry are always giving responsibility to someone else. We really think that every single step of the film industry has a big responsibility.”

Cannes provided THR with an array of data, such as the fact that the juries have been gender balanced since 2011, their presidents since 2013, and the official selection committee is a team currently composed of five women and four men. On top of that, the permanent staff organizing the fest and the Marché du Film is now over 50 percent female, including in leadership positions. 

The percentage of women — out of the total number of directors — who have feature films in the official selection this year (competition, Un Certain Regard, out of competition, Midnight Screening, Special Screening and Cannes Première) is at 34 percent, up 8 percent from 2025. But this number dwindles to just 22 percent in the festival’s marquee competition program, which features films that most often go on to win awards and land top distribution deals.

“We’re having a really hard time breaking through the auteur glass ceiling. There is still the perception that auteurs are men,” says Women in Film CEO Kirsten Schaffer, who notes there are a handful of exceptions, like Chloé Zhao and Jane Campion. At Cannes, a festival that bills itself as the global home of auteurs, female directors can face even more biases. 

Faith Elizabeth, founder of U.K.-based female empowerment organization Yes She Cannes, a Croisette fixture since 2018, says the competition section is where the crux of the issue lies. “Competition is considered in a much higher regard in terms of the selection, because they’re competing for the Palme d’Or,” she tells THR. Yes She Cannes holds events aimed at championing female filmmakers and producers, and arranges tangible support systems for those entering the industry.

The 2026 short film competition is close to parity, with four of the 10 films directed by women, while 44 percent of the special screenings are directed by women. Still, Elizabeth questions, “Are [women] going into different categories that are not as prestigious? Although overall, it looks good, are we just upping the numbers by putting more women in smaller selections?”

This year’s Un Certain Regard section has the highest percentage of women directors, with 10 out of the 19 films directed by women. (Un Certain Regard is also opening with the latest film from director Jane Schoenbrun, who is nonbinary.) “What Un Certain Regard shows us is that it is possible. If the main competition really wanted to, they could,” says Schaffer, who points to other prestigious festivals’ recent history of adding more women to competition sections. 

Of the 22 films in the Berlin Film Festival competition section, nine were directed by women. The Sundance Film Festival, America’s preeminent platform for indie filmmaking, has had parity in its U.S. Dramatic Competition section for several years. Seventy percent of the films in the 2026 competition lineup were directed by women. 

Schaffer and other insiders point out that several of the issues that keep women directors from the highest echelons of the international film industry are systemic, from education and mentorship to financing and distribution. After debuting the 2019 festival competition lineup, where only four competition films were directed by women, Frémaux argued: “Cannes and any festival, we are the last stage of that journey.”

Top film schools like USC, NYU and AFI are now routinely graduating more women than men, but financing for independent productions still predominantly goes to projects from male directors, as do the projects with the larger budgets.

“We have a global crisis in how independent cinema is financed, and it is affecting women and marginalized people first,” says de Casimacker.

Schaffer says she and her team at WIF have a shorthand for this phenomenon: “When the money comes in, the women go out.” She says. “For every Book Club, you have many, many Jason Statham action thrillers.”

Filmmaker Daphne Schmon launched her nonprofit Breaking Through the Lens in 2018 at the Cannes Film Festival, coincidentally the same year of the demonstration on the steps of the Palais. The organization’s focus is on helping female filmmakers find avenues to financing through grants, curated meetings and industry mentorship. Says Schmon: “We purposely focus on the financing stage, because we believe that that’s where the problem lies, and that’s where change needs to happen.”

At a Breaking Through the Lens event at last year’s Cannes, Stewart talked about the difficulties she faced when finding financing for her directorial debut, The Chronology of Water. While goodwill for female filmmakers is high, Schmon notes that this doesn’t translate to funding. “There’s a lot of wanting to get better. But when push comes to shove, there are very, very few people who are putting their money where their mouth is.”

As a U.S.-based independent producer and business development executive, Luna Zhang considers it her mission to finance female-led stories, as well as movies that focus on Asian and minority representation and social consciousness. She comes to Cannes as a producer of a short film competing in La Cinef titled Tian Tian De Mi Mi (Our Secrets), a coming-of-age tale from director Lenti Liang.

Zhang is admittedly buoyed by the amount of female talent set for Cannes premieres this year, but says there remains an industry-wide crisis when it comes to decision-making. “People are still threatened by females, and they don’t want to recognize female authority,” says Zhang. “It’s an ego blocking their way, or [they’re] not confident that a woman can make things happen as [well] as men can.” 

Outside of private financing, there are continuing equity conversations when it comes to the handling of state-funded projects. Some countries, like Sweden, have implemented quotas for the funding that comes out of their film commissions. Notably, one of the women-directed competition titles at this year’s Cannes, Gentle Monster from Marie Kreutzer, is a Swedish co-production. 

Says Elizabeth: “[When] we have organizations that can give opportunities to different voices — not just voices who can necessarily afford to pay for that visibility — [then] we can see the landscape shifting.”

There is an overall acknowledgment that progress is being made, it’s just not at the speed that was promised. “It’s a very slow evolution,” says de Casimacker.

Schmon praises Cannes for upholding artistic excellence and the gains made so far by the fest’s programmers, but would like to see the festival engage more with organizations like hers. “Festivals should really be picking films based on merit. They should also realize [the number of female directors] is pretty shocking,” says Schmon. “I would never want to be in the festival because they had to hit some quota, but that’s not to say that having goals aren’t good.” 

Cannes comes at a moment when female representation in the director’s chair is currently in a precarious situation, domestically. The larger American entertainment industry, which has slashed diversity programs and is currently in a period of retrenchment due to economic headwinds, has also backslid in terms of representation in the director’s chair. In 2025, the number of female directors behind the top 100 grossing films of the year hit a seven-year low, with women representing just 8.1 percent of all directors on these films, according to USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.

Says de Casimacker: “We think that the objective of reaching equity and parity is possible. We just need to have more concrete objectives. Parity was a promise, but we don’t need more promises.”