While the Cannes Film Festival opens its doors on Tuesday May 17, a documentary shines its spotlight on the emergence of women in cinema and their struggle to exist. In 2021, three of the most prestigious prizes in the seventh art were awarded to female directors: an Oscar for Chloe Zhao with nomadland, the Palme d’Or at Cannes for the Titanium of Julia Ducournau and finally the Golden Lion in Venice for Audrey Diwan with The Event.
A particularly fruitful year and rewards won after a hard fight by women who are making parity a real fight in an environment dominated by men. Many of them testify in the latest installment of the documentary series Effrontée: feminine cinemaentitled Girl Power and directed by Leni Mérat.
“When I started in the cinema, I still had an exclusively male team”confides the director Catherine Corsini, who made her first film in 1987. “It’s what I called the Mimile, Paupole, Fifi, mechanical rollers in leather jackets, who looked at me with an air of ‘the little one, what is she going to do to us?’ (…) You really had to prove yourself. And they came to see me and they said to me: ‘Not bad, it’s good. We follow you, because we feel that, here, you know what you want. ‘ It’s horrible. (…) It puts pressure.”
“It was hard. I looked good, but in the evening I would come home and start crying.”
Catherine Corsiniin the documentary “Girl Power”
The filmmaker joined the 50/50 collective, created in 2018 after the scandal of the Harvey Weinstein affair and the MeToo movement, which shook the cinema planet and reshuffled the cards on the place of women in this industry. The association, responsible to promote theequality women and men and the sexual and gender diversity in the movie theater and theaudiovisual, brings together a large number of actresses, directors, but also technicians. If, over the years, certain professions of the seventh art have reached a certain parity, the technical professions remain mainly occupied by men.
“When I got out of school, I went for it, I wanted to mix”says Melissa Petitjean, who works as a mixer. “There are several people who said to me: ‘No, but that’s for men. Why do you want to do this?’ I said, ‘No, it’s not a man’s job. It’s a job where I’m in the process of narrating cinema. I make movies. (…) It is not gendered the trades.
By giving a voice to women who are helping to change cinema, this series of documentaries hopes to change attitudes about the discrimination they face, well beyond the seventh art.
The documentary Girl Powerdirected by Leni Mérat, is broadcast on Monday May 16 at midnight on France 2.