Women in the running at Cannes

The Cannes film festival starts today – with a record four women competing for the main prize. Why so few? The key directors talk to Charlotte Higgins about chauvinism and the Croisette At last year’s Cannes film festival, there was an outcry: there was not a single woman in competition for the Palme d’Or. British director Alicia Duffy screened her debut feature in the Directors’ Fortnight strand, and British directors Sophie Fiennes and Lucy Walker both took documentaries, but the main competition was an all-male affair: Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and 17 others. This year – perhaps by chance, perhaps as a corrective measure taken by the selectors – there are four female film-makers in contention: Lynne Ramsay , the British director of We Need to Talk About Kevin; Australian Julia Leigh ; France’s Maïwenn Le Besco ; and Japan’s Naomi Kawase . This is still only four out of 20 directors – depressingly, the largest number of women ever to have competed for the Palme in a single year since the festival began in 1946. Ramsay describes this as “shocking”. “There is a huge inequality in the numbers,” she tells me. Le Besco, who directs and stars in her third feature, Polisse, screening in Cannes tomorrow, says she has encountered sexism in the

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