The 1940s were often described as the first ‘Golden Age’ of cinema, and this was not any less present at Cannes Film festival 2024, which remains arguably the last vestige of the glamourous world of cinema, where the great, good, and super beautiful congregate on yachts and red carpets to celebrate the year’s best films.

After a stuttering start, inevitably caused by World War II, the very first Cannes Film Festival opened in 1946, with films that are still widely seen and loved even today. Director’s from that era, though long gone, continue to provide the benchmark for young filmmakers, whilst anyone remotely interested in film will have heard of many of the winning alumni of ‘46. 

Features from that year included Brief Encounter, with awards given to the likes of David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock, and Billy Wilder. But the most coveted prize of that year, the ‘Grand Prize’ (later renamed the Palme D’or) was given to the Danish film De Rode Enge (The Red Meadows). It was an extraordinary achievement by its creator, the actress-turned-director Bodil Ipsen. It was her fourth film in as many years,and she would go on to direct a film a year for the next six. Her illustrious acting career spanned the theatre and screen before turning to directing, but unlike her male contemporaries, she and her work appear to be forgotten. 

Any search of successful directors still lists almost exclusively men, and men who have made as many films as Ipsen go on to enjoy the same recognition personally that their films received, with many of those becoming household names and enjoying a fanbase usually reserved for the cast. Students of film look upon these directors with such reverence that their body of work takes on a reputation of its own—Terry Gilliam, Christopher Nolan, and Guy Ritchie are all more recent examples of directors who have become their own genre.

Fast forward to 2012, and outrageously, women were largely invisible. Protests were made across the board about the lack of women nominated. A collective group of leading female directors wrote and published a letter in Le Monte highlighting the male-only shortlist for the Palme D’Or, saying “Men love depth in women, but only in their cleavage.”  

The letter ended with a heavy resignation to the lack of progress for women in film, stating, “Above all, do not let young girls think that one day they might have the nerve to make films and climb the steps of the Palais other than on the arm of a prince charming.”

Fast forward again to today, and we can still count the number of female winners of the Palme D’Or with the fingers of one hand—and a hand that has lost two fingers, at that. Just threewomen have won the grand prize in its modern incarnation: Jane Campion for The Piano (1993), Julia Ducournau for Titane (2021), and Justine Triet for Anatomy of a Fall (2023).

Understandably, the appointment of Greta Gerwig as this year’s Jury President gave call for cautious optimism. There couldn’t have been a better choice, given that Gerwig was behind last year’s monster smash Barbie—the highest grossing film of the year.

“I’ve been making movies for almost 20 years,” Gerwig said,“and this has never not been a question: increasing the number of female directors. In my lifetime it’s changed and gotten better. Every year I cheer because there are more women directors. We’re not done yet, but we are certainly moving in the right direction. It’s all about the long arc of history.”

But there is slow moving history, and then there is the deliberate refusal to give women directors the same coverage, opportunity, and publicity as their male counterparts. For example, Andrea Arnold, OBE won an Oscar in 2005 for her short film, Wasp. At Cannes, her successes have been impressive, claiming three Jury Prizes for Red Rose, Fish Tank, and American Honey. She had three nominations this year, including the Palme D’Or for Bird. Despite this, Arnold remains largely unheard of. 

Whilst Gerwig was smashing the box office, the highest metacritic score went to another woman and her film, Celine Song’s Past Lives. The Guardian called the film the “critical masterpiece of the year,” stating, “It’s an obvious product of exquisite writing (Song also deftly weaves in a careful examination of the immigrant experience that never relies on lazy shortcuts), but also of a raw, hard-to-find chemistry between two actors convincingly reading as 24 and 36. If this is as good as Sundance gets this year, then it’ll have been more than worth the trek.”

Women comprise 12 to 14 % of the directors working in mainstream cinema, and despite that small number, it was a woman that brought in the highest grossing film of the year and a woman that was behind the most widely acclaimed. 

It is time for us all to actively seek out the films of Gerwig, Triet, Arnold, and other female directors to generate the same level of awareness enjoyed by a Christopher Nolan film, for example. Women don’t need special treatment—they are smashing the box office on their own terms—but we owe it to Ipsen, Campion, Ducournau, and Triet to recognise their talents and excellence in their field, to raise their profile for the women who will follow after them, to fight for a richer cinematic experience for us all.