![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() When a film festival, for instance, announces an overwhelmingly male line-up, an oft-heard response is a wistful sigh: I wish Agnès Varda had made a new film this year. Fast forward a year and, in 2018, there was no change in the number of films made by women in the competition lineups of either festival.Īs a male critic who has spent over three decades in auteurist communities (first in India, then in the United States and online), I have come to notice certain patterns of reaction within these communities when gender inequities are exposed. This stark imbalance was greeted by a strong and worldwide media response. In 2017, just three of the nineteen films in competition at Cannes were directed by women Venice was even worse, with just one woman director out of twenty-one. Its impact was driven home (yet again) in selections made this year by two of the most powerful film festivals in the world, the auteurist bastions of Cannes and Venice. Of the many underlying causes, I would like to focus here on one: the enduring hold, on film culture, of auteurism. What will it take to break the stranglehold of male domination in filmmaking? Despite the ever-increasing outcry, amplified by social media over the last few years, the work of women filmmakers continues to be overlooked, marginalized, erased. ![]()
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